If I had to make my Mount Rushmore of phone features, the flashlight would be up there.
What was once a bonus has become the primary reason to keep including a flash on smartphone cameras, and it’s no understatement to say it’s one of my phone’s most useful tools.
Like carrying a penknife, the smartphone flashlight is a must for daily life, and I love it. So I noticed immediately that Google made my favorite feature worse.
My flashlight is no longer as immediately helpful as it was, and it’s all Google’s fault. And worst of all, this keeps happening.
The Android features I usually ignore are actually the best things on my phone
Even better, they require little-to-no set up
The flashlight change is less than illuminating
What on earth could Google have possibly done to make the flashlight worse? Surely it’s too simple to break — turn it on, make light, turn it off.
You’d think that was perfect. No need to mess with it, it’s fine. But it turns out you can ruin perfection, and it’s by reducing the simplicity.
My usual way of using the flashlight is to switch it on and then immediately turn the screen off to conserve battery. So I initially didn’t realize Google had added a new box to change the flashlight’s intensity.
But I absolutely noticed when I went to switch it off, and it didn’t turn off.
Before this change, tapping the Quick Settings icon would switch the flashlight on and off. Now, it just opens a box that also includes a setting to turn it off. And it’s super annoying.
My muscle memory is ruined, and I hate it. Just let me turn my flashlight off and get on with my day.
I don’t want to find a teeny-tiny button to press when you had a better way of doing it before the update. Certainly not when I’m reading stories about Pixel flashlights burning themselves.
Being able to control the intensity of the flashlight can be useful, but I don’t need it all that much. What I do need is the previously perfect flashlight feature.
This is, ultimately, a small issue. And I probably wouldn’t mind as much if it didn’t feel as if it had been forced on me. But Android has previous experience of forcing these sorts of changes, and it’s a big problem.
Some things should be sacred
Google loves to change things for no reason, and sometimes, it changes perfection.
Often, it does this because it wants to improve something — and that’s forgivable. That’s what happened with my precious flashlight. That, I can forgive. But sometimes, it does it so it can push something.
We still call the power button the “power button,” even though it isn’t anymore. Hold down the power button on most modern phones, and it won’t ask you if you want to restart or shut down. Instead, it’ll boot up an AI assistant.
Google took everything we hated about AI buttons, and ported it over to the button we actually used.
Almost every time I’ve booted up Gemini or Google Assistant through the power button, I feel like I’ve been tricked into it. Because most of the time, it’s not what I wanted to do at all.
Google also did this, to a lesser extent, with my home screen.
I cannot tell you how little I want a Google search bar on there. It’s ugly, it reminds me that my phone is secured to Google’s yoke, and I never use it.
When I want to search for something, I open a browser window and search there. Despite it being stapled to my home screen, I forget it’s there whenever it would actually be useful.
So it’s not even doing its job — it’s just an eyesore that takes up space I would rather use for something else.
I used to be able to remove it, but nope, Google stopped me from doing that, too.
It isn’t just Google that does this. Remember when Samsung made that awful decision to change the way you access notifications and Quick Settings in One UI 7? Swipe down on the right to open Quick Settings, or further to the left for notifications.
That was terrible, too, and it didn’t need to be done. A double-pull was perfectly fine, and it didn’t need changing. Nobody desperately needed to access their Quick Settings enough.
It wasn’t the first to do this, but it was the biggest Android manufacturer to do it, and so, it was likely the first place many people discovered it.
Can you imagine how many family members played tech support when that change went live?
As a right-handed person who uses my phone one-handed, I thought they’d removed the notifications shade altogether for the first few minutes of my time on One UI 7.
The lack of choice is stifling, and it feels rude. This is my phone. Why do you get to change how I use it?
There’s a different way to do this, and it’s already been done before.
There’s a right way to do this
Remember when Android moved to gesture navigation, rather than three keys at the bottom of the screen?
You probably can’t remember exactly when the changeover happened, and that’s because the transition was handled well.
The rollout of the swipe controls was phased, so while the controls were there for a while, people weren’t immediately switched over to using them.
They could use them if they wanted to, but they had the choice to keep using the old method if they preferred.
Sure, this slowed adoption down, but if those controls are the future, what does it matter? People could start using them at their leisure and when they chose. Not because someone dictated it.
It’s all about choice. People like to feel as if they’ve chosen to do something rather than being railroaded into it.
Customer choice is important, and it feels like modern Android has forgotten that.
