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Mostly variable screen size and resolution.
Google created a system called DP (not DPI, or PPI), or density-independent pixels.
To keep it very short: The gist is that bigger resolution on the same screen size just allows better clarity, but doesn't change the size of elements in relation to the physical world. So a button would have the same real-world size on a 720p device or a 1080p one (assuming the screen size is the same), which is desired because with phones, the screen is the thing you use to control the device. App devs use DPs as the target, not a resolution itself, the system can handle how things are actually displayed.
This is fine for an interface that uses color as the way to differentiate elements, but it gets really weird when you use something less flat. Like, imagine you are using gradient and shadows to separate UI elements from each other, but you want it to have the same real world size, like Android. On some devices, the actual pixel size of the gradient can be too small to actually render properly so it looks blocky, or the pixel size is too large, and it looks weirdly over smooth.
Gradients can also scale.
Everything can scale.
The aesthetic we're talking about was for 17" screens at 1024x768. Your phone will look fine.
Gradients can scale, but if you are trying to use a big fancy gradient effect and the actual pixel size is, like, 1 pixel, then you lose all those effects and it looks weird. You can kinda see something similar with Apps icons losing visible detail and looking weird if they are too detailed.
IIRC Android actually has the minimum width/height of 360 DP, which is basically 360 pixels (or it was 320?)
Oh wow, so a one-DP drop shadow scaled to 4K would be six whole pixels.
This is ridiculous. No kidding fewer pixels means less detail. That makes a screen full of identical flat shapes worse.
The aforementioned original iPhone was 480x320. The big dumb candy icons looked fine.
If, and only if, the screen size was the same. And even then it would be 10 pixels.
And if the screen was larger it would be... less?
I remain devoid of shits to give.
Exactly. A 4k screen will have the same amount of DP as a 480p screen if both have the exact same size. Elements will appear smoother and more defined, like letters, on the 4k screen than they would on the 480p one, because the 4k display has more pixels per DP, but the actual number of DPs on screen will be the same.
Like, imagine you have a 1080p phone and a 4k Tablet that physically could fit 4 of those phone screens. The Tablet would have two times the amount of vertical and horizontal DPs than the phone, but each DP would correspond to the exact same amount of pixels, and the buttons would have the same real world size.
Okay.
And that makes 2000-era drop shadows stop working... how?
How much smaller than an original 2007 iPhone is your phone, if it has the resolution of an original 2007 iPhone, but can't match the graphical clarity of icon design seen on the original 2007 iPhone?
It doesn't stop working per se, but it starts looking... weird.
Take for instance this screenshot, I believe it is from an iPhone 1st gen, but I've never seen an iPhone so who knows.
You can see how the battery icon gradient is kinda weird close to the outlines.
The bottom area of the axis of the General icon is almost bleeding with the background
How the top of the Sounds, Brightness, Wallpaper and iPhone is starting to blend with the highlight.
And the Safari icon is a blurry mess.
Even here, you can see that the actual list items lack any sort of skeuomorphic design, being separated by an outline to improve visibility. Heck, even the status bar and the top app bar uses outlines to separate them from the main view, foregoing drop shadows.
Oh no, part of an icon has less contrast. Because that totally matters when the rest of the icon has intense contrast. Which somehow justifies this modern trend of everything being pastel with no contrast in the first place.
This is dumb.
Everything you're describing looks fine. Even the barely-distinct letters on the Safari icon don't matter, because they're just hinting for the crystal clear indications that it's a compass. Meanwhile in Android 12, there is no separation, everything's a randomly-colored circle, none of the pictographic icons are even large within their circle, and even the battery icon is less readable. Material You is even worse, because they got rid of the random colors. Peripheral vision? Never heard of it. Skimming? Nope! Squint, peasant. Color is forbidden, unless it's all four primary colors randomly segmented inside one of Google's shitty unlabeled icons.
And you want me to believe it has to be this way, because what if that modern-ass zero-bezel 8" screen had the resolution of a Game Boy Advance.
You are misunderstanding the situation. The safari logo is a mess, we know what it means because we've seen the big res version. For a designer, this means that color can get in the way when pixels are limited and it makes then aware that too much detail can result in a visual mess, the solution is to create a logo that can work in monochrome and to make the necessary parts of the logo more prominent.
The safari logo removed the letters and focused on the compass metaphor. On Android, notification icons are monochrome, so this implies the app logo should also work in monochrome. What this all means is that a Designer is more likely to start with a monochrome and low detail logo icon and then start adding details if necessary, because removing detail is more difficult than adding.
I don't think the picture you sent of Android 12 is actually from Android 12, at least I think it is from Samsung due to the icon colors, not AOSP. I really hate Samsung's implementation of Material Design so I will not defend them, because it really sucks.
I was pointing out that even in the old iPhone, the actual division of items were made with colors and outlines, not with gradients, which are not great to actually create UIs
This is purely speculation on my part after using Material Design 3 for an App Redesign, but I think the actual Material You system probably started as a way to help developers get a color palette. Material Design 1 and 2 required the devs to actually code the colors(or get the palette from a website) and sometimes this resulted in weird combinations, Google simplified the process so devs can just add 3/4 colors and it is harmonized.
At some point they figured out it would be useful to have the seed be a dynamic image, like the new media stream controls on the quick settings which use the colors of the album cover. If there is already a tool go generate a palette from a picture, adding a way to generate the palette from the user wallpaper is a nice bonus.
Tl;dr: I think Material You is a bonus from the development and streamlining of Material Design color palette. As well as a greater understanding that designing with saturation is better than with colors due to the existence of color blind people.
The only colors that have a contrast issue in Material Design 3 is actually the surface container colors, but they are not meant to be used together without another means of separation, so it is fine
'Color is bad, actually,' says alleged designer. As if 'working' in black and white means there's any benefit to being in black and white. Whilst complaining about a logo that's already basically white-on-blue. And is plainly a compass even to me, when I haven't touched a Mac in twenty years.
Having controls change colors dynamically is awful for usability. How do you encourage that, right after complaining that part of the Safari icon is only as distinct from its background as the entirety of any Material You icon?
I reiterate: this is dumb.
No kidding gradients aren't the only thing we're talking about. But they're a detail you pointed to as somehow awful at this resolution... even though the color in the icons is mostly gradients, and again, they look fine. If anything, gradients suffer at larger scale, because screens and color-spaces only have so many shades of green.
And doing ANYTHING for the sake of 320x480 in 2023 is just fucking insane! Have we addressed that, directly? The fact we're even talking about how this style looks at original 2007 iPhone resolutions, while discussing enormous high-def pentile OLED pocket supercomputers, makes no god-damn sense. 'It wouldn't work as well as it did on the the displays it originally worked on' is a complete non-sequitur, even if it wasn't self-contradictory,
Why the hell are we still talking about this?!
Flat design is demonstrably awful for usability. It is an obstacle to recognition.
Excessive versions of the alternative worked just fucking fine on phones with itty-bitty screens and 1980s resolutions. They won't somehow be worse, larger and brighter and crisper than ever.
You don't need any blathering about palettes to add relief shading or drop shadows.
Google keeps making this worse, and they're not alone, and I don't care why. It needs to stop.
There are bunch of benefits to that, just look at the popularity of monochrome icon packs. Even before the official introduction of Adaptive Icons on Android 12, the status bar was already using monochrome icons to increase visibility. Notification icons were monochrome since a while ago.
When the UI itself works without hue, you are pretty much guaranteed that color blind users aren't left behind, how's that not a benefit?
I mentioned they eventually increased the most defining features of the icon after a Redesign, as the cardinal directions letters were removed to make the needle and the... degrees(?) more visible.
I'm frankly unsure how the hell would you get a Material You icon (actually Adaptive Icon) to have the same low contrast as the safari icon. IIRC it is using
primaryandon-primarycolor tokens.Agree to disagree.
Actually, the newly released Pixel Tablet has a closer than you think density to the first iPhone. IIRC each dp on the Pixel Tablet is less than 1.75 pixels. It isn't even double than the first iPhone.
Status bar icons are boring to be unobtrusive. They have goals directly opposite to the identifiability of most controls. Where they convey information, there's only a dozen you really expect, instead of the zillion things you can do or install or click on. That's also why they're not labeled.
... do you understand icons are supposed to contrast with each other? You're talking about a sea of colored circles, or a sea of uncolored circles, with itty-bitty binary icons. Quite frankly, what the fuck? This is not "agree to disagree" territory. It is objectively awful for the function of these little pictures in an interface.
For god's sake, even within your iPhone example, with multiple white-on-blue icons, there's different shades of blue for Apple's browser and e-mail versus the system settings, and different weights for a giant white envelope versus fine compass engraving, and a red accent for the needle. And your criticism of these is to nitpick corners and edges (despite obvious unsharp masking and dark outlines clarifying almost every edge) as if you don't know part of the icon sticking out means the whole icon sticks out. It doesn't fucking matter if the corners did 'bleed into the background' - which they don't - because you can still see what it is, in the middle! And the middle's gotta be enough, because in the sterile interfaces you're championing, the middle's all there is.
It doesn't need to change color to match a different background because matching the background is the opposite of what it's for. Candy icons tend to stick out on dark or light - because they contain both dark and light aspects. And those don't need to be razor-sharp, large-print-playing-card style iconography, because they're in fucking color. Conveying information through color alone is bad - but some information is conveyed through color, and it's kind of important to recognition and usability.
If you want to mention you have some form of colorblindness, that would explain a lot.
Google and all keep pushing this aggressively barren motif because it makes things look "clean" and "consistent," but the actual purpose of the software is that users want to find a thing out of a sea of a million other things without having to look at and think about every individual thing.
But I can't deal with you quoting a paragraph that says "old density doesn't fucking matter but old density was fine anyway" just so you can be wrong in a whole new way by saying that well actually new density's at least twice as high now. And no I don't fucking care where the "almost" goes in that sentence. It's three different kinds of pointless. Why am I still here.