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How is Android 6.x these days?

mikeymikec

mikeymikec

Lifer
I'm wondering whether to upgrade my Nexus 5 to Android 6x (currently on 4.4.4), again. AFAIK, initially most people were fairly pro Android 5x but my impression was that the general opinion towards it had soured somewhat.
 
I like it on my Nexus 6p. IIRC the problems people were complaining about were specific to the 5x, not marshmallow in general. Idle battery life increases alone are worth it.
 
I like it overall. Doze is a very nice addition, and it does help. I lose about 1-2% of battery life on Doze when I sleep (~8 hours). I also enjoy the new permissions paradigm - sort of like iOS now. Google Now on Tap seems interesting, and I think this will get better over time (like Google Now did). I just wish they would implement a system wide dark mode - this would be very beneficial for devices with AMOLED displays like the Nexus 6P.
 
Upgraded my 2015 Moto G January 7. Biggest improvements are to SD card storage/management, battery life and app permissions.

The pull down menu is better with a few added options, the cellular network settings work better. Where I'm at 4G is much faster than LTE and before I would have to reboot the phone to change out of LTE. Now it works like it should.

Overall improvement for sure.
 
Honestly, I haven't seen huge changes over 5.x although battery seems a bit better. Still not as good idle drain (no Doze) as 4.4 though.

Regarding the new features though:

  • Doze is nice, but overrated. It reduces battery drain by stopping notifications (except for high priority GCM). To me the issue should be addressing standby drain. A phone in my pocket (un-Dozed) should be draining 1% / hour like in Kit Kat. You shouldn't need Doze to get great standby drain.
  • Permissions is nice but I think it's more a privacy benefit than anything else. At the end of the day, it's too much like Vista UAC where people just click yes yes yes, or No and then their app breaks. The other day my friend wanted to attach a picture but saw the permissions prompt, got freaked out and clicked No. Great. And furthermore, apps that want to abuse background data and wake up your phone can still do it. So it's not really a battery savings either.


A few negatives


  • You can't restore the Notification Ticker anymore. Boo. Ticker > Heads Up in my opinion, and the best way notifications should've been done was Ticker for all non full screen apps, and Heads Up when you're in full screen apps or in another app and getting a call (because call interrupts everything, and you can't get out until you dismiss the call)
  • Now on Tap is mildly useful, but less useful than the old long press shortcut to Google. After 2 months with it, I decided to turn it off.


The 6P and 5X have their own positives/drawbacks, but I'll leave that to another discussion since this is solely about 6.0.
 
I'm sneaking this in here but is there anyone out there having a problem with the Path app on Marshmallow? This is one thing that I'm completely confused of. Path was almost completely useless to me in 6.0. It is slow like hell, any kind of action (like tapping the 'notification' tab, scrolling down on your homepage, or even simply clicking on someone's profile) took a long time to load (at least 30-40 seconds to do anything), a lot of times Path even gave up after a while and stopped loading, showing a blank screen.

I of course have tried the obvious things like deleting cache/data, rebooting the phone, uninstall/reinstall app, without any effect.

Right after I received 6.0.1 it seemed like everything was better for a while, but then the problem came back. It took me 5 minutes to post a freakin picture this morning.

I have tested Path on several other devices, some are 3 years old or even older, and none are showing this symptom. None of the devices are Marshmallow though, which is why I started to think that maybe Path simply isn't optimized for Marshmallow. But if this is true there has to be a lot more complaints out there about this, which is not what I'm seeing.
 
I'm using 6.0 on a Moto G (2015) and I personally don't notice the difference between 5.1.1.

Seems stable. But I'm just a text, email, phone kinda guy.
 
I love it on my 2013 Nexus 7 (excellent battery life, stable and fast); have yet to get it on my T-Mobile S5, but 5.1.1 on that phone has been painless. So much so that I really don't care if I get Marshmallow. FWIW, Gingerbread on my phone was a pig, so I guess it depends on the device and carrier (Google excepted); YMMV in any case.
 
6.x is great, much better than 5.x which I didn't like at all, especially with the silencing of notifications which made me miss alarms many times. I've been using it on my Nexus 5/7/5x and it's been great.
 
Love it. Using Chroma rom build from October. Nexus 6 battery life is easily 50% more than my previous S4 active. Got it for $300. Good deal considering all the power it packs, the full 6 inch screen, when you consider what AAPL charges for their iphone 6 plus which is the nearest competing phone which I passed over because of the lack of RAM on the device.
 
pete6032 said:
Really liking doze feature. I don't ever use Google on tap.
Click to expand...

That doze feature is a bit too good, gmail doesn't seem to wake up from time to time, i got an email in the middle of the night but i only received a notification some 12 hours later.
 
I've upgraded to Android 6.0.1 on my Nexus 5; all is good so far. It seems more responsive than the initial release of Android 5 was (the phone and contacts apps seemed to take a little longer to load). I've got around the god-awful timer in the default clock app by downloading 'Kitkat clock' by 'maxlogix', which seems to work (except alarms, but since I don't change the daily alarms often, they can stay with the default clock app).

The only remaining question is battery life, which I don't expect to alter much because I only activate my phone's Internet connection on the occasion that I need it.

One minor annoyance is that the default colour scheme can't be altered back to something similar to Kitkat, but I've changed the keyboard app's colour scheme to the closest equivalent.
 
shabby said:
That doze feature is a bit too good, gmail doesn't seem to wake up from time to time, i got an email in the middle of the night but i only received a notification some 12 hours later.
Click to expand...
That's the problem with Doze. It suspends notifications unless its a high priority GCM notification.

That's why I said its overrated. It's basically turning off a bunch of features on your phone to give you good battery. While that obviously works (so does turning off the water main to stop a faucet leak), its not really getting at the root cause of the problem. Google needs to work on better idle battery drain on phones without needing to compromise functionality. I think there's probably something about the waking your phone every 60 seconds to ping for location that kills our batteries so quickly.
 
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