revisiting my review https://programming.dev/post/868117

now that android 14 is out.

First, we have this quote on Android 14 from Dave Burke “And I don’t know, we may not have talked enough about this, but we’ve done a ton of work to reduce CPU activity in background apps.”

Yes. This is nice. The overall experience is now appropriate. Less weird lag and chunky performance. The poor multitasking software combined with chunky performance was miserable. Now it’s at least tolerable if not totally great.

Battery life is less unpredictable. I can consistently get a full days usage with no concern. Not exactly sufficient for traveling without concern but manageable. Instead of needing to stay tethered to a battery pack you only need one just in case.

A huge issue I had previously was the fingerprint reader. Happy to report than the reader now works predictably and reliabily. Up to the limits of a silly power button reader. No longer frustrating.

The software performance is all great but what about updates to better support the screen size and multitasking? Sadly, nothing to note. Still fairly miserable but certainly less janky.

Screen utilization and layout is still unsuitable. Lots of wasted screen space. Rotation controls are more suggestions and insufficient.

Multitasking is the real trouble tho. Will going back actually take you back? Or is the forward gesture required to go back to the previos activity? Impossible to say. Might as well be random. So you try the app switcher and the preview shows an app I the state you want to go back to. Switch to the app aaaaand the preview was a lie. The app resumes in some pseudo random state.

Overall the OS update is great. However there is no patching of software that will make up for the hardware deficiencies. And unfortunately, the software updates still don’t enable effective multitasking.

7/10