Yes, this is horrible UX design and there's absolutely no need for such inflated amounts of padding around everything.
Huge companies are the absolute worst offenders for crap like this. Seriously, have you ever tried using Facebook to manage business pages? It is unbelievably poor.
Google is by far the most hypocritical, however, because their search engine ranks pages lower for UX sins like "cumulative layout shift" while at the same time committing those sins themselves.
(Having said all that, I would not personally expect an online spreadsheet app to look great on "half a 13" screen" on first load.)
Ha. Facebook Page management. I used to work for a 5-person company, and setting up the Facebook page was one of the things that ended up on my plate. We were acquired over two years ago, by a Real Company, with Actual Marketing People.
It’s been my mission to get this damn Facebook page out of my life. I have no business having anything to do with it, especially now. Every few months I manage to wrangle someone from Marketing to take it off my hands, but most of the time it takes me at least half an hour for me to work out how to even grant someone else permission to manage the page. This is AFTER I find the official Facebook help article for this process.
Through a combination of the Marketing person losing interest, and my ineptitude, I think I only managed to actually close this one off a few weeks ago. There’s every chance that in a few months I’ll find out that I didn’t do it properly.
I’m in my late 20s. I understand this generation of social networks. I was a very heavy Facebook user up until a couple of years ago. I’m not some clueless old idiot. This isn’t an operation that Facebook has any incentive to ‘hide away’. I can’t possibly see how this is anything other than egregious incompetence on Meta’s part. They’re simply too big to make…anything, anymore.
> Android is also quite a space waster compared to iOS. It's much less comfortable to use a small Android than a small iOS device.
Now in terms of reading I'm sure you're right, but on small iOS devices the bounding boxes around certain buttons are so unbelievably tight that I even see people who've been using an iPhone mini for years still have to press 4 times to get them to register. Never had that issue with small Androids.
The minimum tap bounds for a button in the Apple Human Interface guidelines is 44x44 points. So the developer must of not followed those guidelines. The size of the screen shouldn’t have an impact on this.
Which "small Android" is the size of iPhone mini? The ones I have encountered were basically feature phones running Android that I can't remember a single model name. Android went big a lot earlier than iPhone did (iPhone 6/Plus). [Remember "phablet" was a word?]
Just the goddamn top bar in Android consumes (used to?) 30% of screen in landscape.
> Which "small Android" is the size of iPhone mini?
Unfortunately, only old ones. For Samsung, S8 is when the phones got really big. S7 (5.1 inch) and earlier were smaller than the iPhone 13 mini (5.4) My first Android was the original Galaxy S - comparitively tiny, but I definitely didn't struggle as much to tap buttons as on the 13 mini.
Huge companies are the absolute worst offenders for crap like this. Seriously, have you ever tried using Facebook to manage business pages? It is unbelievably poor.
Google is by far the most hypocritical, however, because their search engine ranks pages lower for UX sins like "cumulative layout shift" while at the same time committing those sins themselves.
(Having said all that, I would not personally expect an online spreadsheet app to look great on "half a 13" screen" on first load.)