Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy_D
What is it about the Fire OS that's so terrible?
I never swipe left or right, so I never see or use any of the screens designed to keep you in the Amazon ecosystem. The only screen I ever see is the home screen and that one resembles the simple desktop of desktop OSes with icons for apps I installed arranged in the order that I want them. I group some of them in folders. I put all the Android apps in a folder that I never use. I use a file manager (Es File Explorer) to open videos and books etc. It's not perfect, but, imo, it's simple and servicable.
So my question is not rhetorical. Why is stock Android so much better?=
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Android tends to be graceful. FireOS tends to be clumsy. Either one will do most of the things the other will do, at least if you know how to make it do it. Android does it easier, more intuitively and more gracefully.
Amazon's philosophy in all their products is to keep things simple for the average person and that's not a bad philosophy, although it's not the preferred way of the geeks among us. The problem is that Amazon's designers, and this is true nearly across their product lines, tend to make things more difficult and less intuitive while trying to simplify. I think they're just not very good designers.
So you know where I'm coming from, I'm a long time very happy Amazon customer. I buy from them when I can and from others if I have to. They've made my life easier. So this isn't prejudice against Amazon. I'm pretty much an Amazon booster. I'm not a booster of Amazon's designers.
I'm a retired programmer, long retired and out of date, I'm afraid, and interface design was never my specialty. But I have designed a LOT of interfaces and I do know something about it. I even took a few courses in it. As I said it was never my specialty and I don't consider myself an expert on the subject but I'm also not chopped liver.
A simple example from my 7" Fire: my home screen has enough lines of icons even after putting all the icons I can into folders that there are 2 pages of icons. When I want to see the bottom page I can't simply scroll like you can on even the ungodly Ipad, I have to scroll all the way and then hold it a second or the page will bounce back. When I scrolled I made my intentions perfectly clear but the Fire doesn't believe me till I hold it there. On other tablets I give a little push and wallah! It scrolls the rest of the way for me as though it has inertia.
I picked this as an example because it's so totally obvious after just a few minutes using the tablet and because it's such a very poor design choice. And there are many many others. FireOS is really a pain to use.
That said, I have the 7" Fire and I use it and I'm glad I have it. It's the tablet that I keep going around the clock so it's always handy when I want it, ready to go, ready to frustrate at a moment's notice. I got it when they put them on sale for $30 and it was worth every penny of that.
Barry