Why would people want large phones that you can't comfortably use with one hand??? Phones are supposed to be small and used with one hand. Most of the time you use it, it's gonna be outdoors, when you'd want to have the other hand available to do something else, such as holding onto the handrail on a bus. Why would someone prefer a large phone that is less securely held (=more probable to drop/break), and strains your fingers, in the single-hand usage scenario???
The only near-convincing argument I've seen is that it's for "content consumption", which is a "fancy" word for "watching videos". But it's not like people didn't watch videos before the enlargement of phones. People even watched videos on iPod nanos (and that's definitely too small even for me). I can comfortably watch videos on a phone with 69mm width (which I already consider to be too big). Why do you need even larger phones than that??? It's not like iPad minis don't exist.
The word "phablet" fell into disuse, because phones that would have been called "phablets" back then, are just "normal-sized" now. That's crazy. That's not right.
In 2022, 68mm was "small", 71mm was "normal", and 74mm was "large". In 2024, 68mm is gone from new phones, 71mm is "small", 74mm is "normal", and 77mm is "large". Again, what???
For some reason, with the enlargement of phones, came the wastage of space in new UI designs. Google's Material Design is the worst offender. Just compare a screenshot of Android 4.x and Android 5 and beyond. People say that large screens are for displaying more content, but then waste that space displaying excessive blank spaces, often leaving even less information than older UIs on a smaller screen. How ironic. I guess one day users would be content with only one line of text on a 100-inch screen.
That's not only a problem on Android, as Material Design began to be applied on Chrome. The UI before 53 was pre-material design. 53 made MD1 the default. In Chrome 53 and 54, there was a flag #top-chrome-md that can switch it back to pre-MD. 55 removed the non-MD option from that flag, leaving "material" and "material hybrid" as the only options. Similarly, 69 made MD2 the default, with 71 removing the ability to go back to MD1. MD2 wastes even more space than MD1.
And then other companies followed suit. Firefox added excessive padding, and planned to remove the "compact" option before backing down. Windows 11 has excessive padding in its new context menus.
Skeuomorphism in iOS ⩽6 was elegant, sophisticated, and detailed. Flat design is none of that, and it's boring. As with space-wasting, other companies followed suit. Windows 8 and beyond are a flat mess. Material Design is flat too. Many brand logos are also simplified and/or flattened.
In the name of "privacy and security", more and more freedoms are taken away from users.
Taking away root filesystem and root user access from the user isn't acceptable to me, but apparently it's the norm now. I still jailbreak my iOS devices and root my Android devices if possible, but the future of both seems bleak. I still can't fathom how M$ looked at iOS and Android and concluded that people like not being able to access the root fs, and decided to not include that access in Windows Phone, when Windows Mobile had it.
As some of these changes affect apps, not just the OS itself, and app developers will eventually migrate to new API levels, staying on an old version of Android will not suffice. You'll have to use old versions of apps to get the old behavior.
Whether to allow full filesystem access to apps, and which apps to install, should be the user's choice, not Google's.
Here's why XP is the best version of Windows and why later versions are bad:
Ever since Vista, consistency is thrown out of the window. For example, before Vista, "Display properties" has settings for themes, wallpapers, screensavers, and screen resolutions, each in a different tab. Since Vista every tab is broken up into its own window/page, and only some of the tabs are redesigned in the "NT 6 style". In screensaver settings, the tab view is still kept despite the fact that there is only one tab. In Windows 8, the UI/UX is further fragmented by adding yet another place ("PC settings" aka "ImmersiveSettings") and type of UI/UX (Metro) to the mix.
Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4, 2000, and XP, mostly share the same UI/UX. While XP added things, either to make it easier to use for beginners or to make it prettier, they can all be disabled to revert the UI/UX to the pre-XP state. However, Windows 7 removed the classic start menu, and Windows 8 removed the classic theme, requiring third-party software to get something similar.
Vista added UAC, breaking - or at least changing the behavior of - old programs that assume some system locations are writable. For example, on XP and older, PopCap games read from / write to save files at the "userdata" folder at where the game exe file is, while on Vista and newer, the save file location is instead under C:\ProgramData, even if the game's location is writable. I would say that users should be responsible with their own system, so such measure to protect users from themselves shouldn't exist; but this has always existed in Unix-likes, so I guess there's a point. At least it makes malwares unable to damage the system, if a 0-click malware happens to infect it.
Since Windows 10, updates are forced onto users. Users no longer have a say in whether to install them, or when to install them. That includes the reboot that is often necessary after installing updates. That means the following regularly happens:
"Windows Update bringing back unwanted stuff" is a "recurring theme" in Windows 10. Supposedly, if you remove the "suggested apps" aka ads in the start menu (in non-LTSC), it would come back in the next update. While LTSC gets rid of "feature updates", if I install real Edge back, the next update would replace it with ChromEdge again, even on LTSC. It looks like M$'s updating mechanism now just expects and forces the OS to be configured a certain way. I miss the days before such rollup patches existed, when there's a separate patch for each issue.
An OS should work for - not against - the user. The user shouldn't have to fight with the OS.
At least in Windows 10, UWP/Metro apps would be suspended after a long period of being minimalized, despite not being closed. And in some apps, state is not retained across suspensions. I noticed this in the "PC settings" app. This should never happen on PCs.
Rounded corners are used by default in Windows 11. Whichever idiot that made "cropping corner pixels to make rounded corners" the default should be fired. Back in windows xp, Vista and 7, the window border was thicc, and "rounded corners" were achieved by making the corner of the border round, without affecting the actual window content. Windows 8 and 10 went back to having a thin border and thus lost the rounded corner. Yet 11 made this absolutely stupid choice.
And lastly, don't talk about stability or security, as these would and should improve with time.