Kitkat vs Nougat? (serious discussion)

[mohit9206]

This is not a joke question. Everyone agreed (well most people) that Lollipop was a step back from Kitkat. I saw thousands of posts filled with people absolutely hating Lollipop and reverting back to kitkat for many different reasons while those who couldn't revert regretted updating to "Lollipoop". Some of the reasons being major battery drain issues, childish UI design of style over substance, Lollipop being less efficient and more heavy therefore lots of lag and reduced battery life verus light and nimble kitkat, innumerable bugs, and various other design and usability issues.
Marshmallow improved a lot of things from what i read and people being generally happy with it for the most part even though still no dark theme but still good for the most part.
Now that Nougat has been out for a while what's the general consensus on it? Is it all what you hoped it would be or is it not worthy of being called 7.0 instead of 6.1? Comparison with kitkat may sound odd but kitkat was the most refined version ever before it went downhill and so would you say that Nougat in 2016 has outdone Kitkat from 2013 in EVERY area? Is there anything from the old ICS, JB and KK era that you wish was present in Nougat? Is Nougat the best Android OS version ever? What are some of the things that still need to be addressed by Google that you wish was already present in Nougat?

 

[TGIS]

This is not a joke question. Everyone agreed (well most people) that Lollipop was a step back from Kitkat. I saw thousands of posts filled with people absolutely hating Lollipop and reverting back to kitkat for many different reasons while those who couldn't revert regretted updating to "Lollipoop". Some of the reasons being major battery drain issues, childish UI design of style over substance, Lollipop being less efficient and more heavy therefore lots of lag and reduced battery life verus light and nimble kitkat, innumerable bugs, and various other design and usability issues.
Marshmallow improved a lot of things from what i read and people being generally happy with it for the most part even though still no dark theme but still good for the most part.
Now that Nougat has been out for a while what's the general consensus on it? Is it all what you hoped it would be or is it not worthy of being called 7.0 instead of 6.1? Comparison with kitkat may sound odd but kitkat was the most refined version ever before it went downhill and so would you say that Nougat in 2016 has outdone Kitkat from 2013 in EVERY area? Is there anything from the old ICS, JB and KK era that you wish was present in Nougat? Is Nougat the best Android OS version ever? What are some of the things that still need to be addressed by Google that you wish was already present in Nougat?

I wish there was the battery life. Marshmallow still beats Nougat on my 6P

 

[ptkelly]

Let's see. "Everyone, well almost everyone, agreed that lollipop...." "I saw thousands of posts with people hating Lollipop and reverting to KitKat...." And my favorite was the serious, "...while those who couldn't revert regretted updating to "Lollipoop"." And, my god, there's still no dark theme. Will the world survive?

I like Nougat. I don't have battery drain on my 5x. As for KitKat, I can't remember. When I move to a new operating system I tend to forget the old one. I don't do well now on an old machine with Windows 7 or with a phone running Android 4.4.

So, I like Nougat. I can even think about no dark theme without crying.

 

[Britain Gilliam]

Maybe they hit what i call the windows wall. What happens when a technology can't be improved on any more? (like Windows 7) It goes through cycles of bizarre features, artificial bugs, patches for those bugs, and then genuine bugs.

 

[Markxmlx]

Lollipop was great to my Nexus 5. I know some Lollipop upgrades weren't good to other phones so I can't really talk for other people.

With that said, I think "stable" 7.0 is essentially developer preview 6. I think 7.1 is the real stable 7.0 considering even the developer preview 1 of 7.1 has not only improved touch latency but also general UI performance and (to a lesser extent) battery life for me.

Given the absence of many tangible differences between 7 and 7.1 (Pixel exclusive features notwithstanding) I think this .1 update is all about optimisation and refinement over 7. It's even sometimes called NMR1 - Nougat MAINTENANCE Release 1.

So I would just wait for the official rollout of 7.1 before assessing how good the "Nougat" update is.

I think Google released Nougat like this:

"Features first, refinement second."

I think it should be the "features and refinement at the same time" so that you don't have this downtime where people have a worse user experience due to the instability new software features could introduce but alas, I'm not Google so I can't decide.

I hope people complaining about to the battery life from Nougat 7.0 will be a lesson to Google to tread with caution the next time they decide to not optimise.

 

[ptkelly]

Of course, Windows 7 wasn't the peak. The peak would have been DOS. Downhill since then. Me, I rather like Windows 10 and Android 7.

 

[syspry]

I'm simply tired of Google only hitting a 50% success rate the last couple of years with battery drain issues when releasing new OS versions.

 

[tonyr6]

Lollipop was the worst. Not only was the battery drain severe but I had call issues where the party calling me sounded like they were underwater but they can hear me fine with voLTE and lets not forget unreliable Wifi issues of serve slow down which I had with my Asus N66U that I was forced to upgrade to the Netgear R7000. Then LTE dropping down to the unreliable HSPA with 4 bars just because LTE was 1 or two bars but actually worked.

Marshmallow fixed all those issues and Nougat was more of just a tweaked interface.

 

[J Dubbs]

I'm writing this from an older Dragon Touch Chinese Android 7 inch phablet running KitKat.... what's the most shocking, and my biggest complaint, is that this isn't really any different than writing it from my high spec phone running marshmallow. And I would expect a BIG difference in some area. The only real difference I notice is a higher res screen and more bugs on marshmallow..... otherwise this phablet does all the same things as my marshmallow phone costing over 4 times as much
And Nougat isn't that different from marshmallow
Things that make you go hmmm.....

 

[ptkelly]

I am older than most trees and I'm quite familiar with the "Things were better in the good ole days" syndrome. I loved MS DOS. I could do things with DOS I can't do with Windows. My all-time favorite word processor ran like lightning on DOS and never got moved to Windows.

And, life goes on. Nostalgia is fun but don't get it confused with reality.