What fresh Flat hell is this

Android 14 on this device is really, really, *really* janky. Like "this is a beta OS" levels of jank. I have found three different ways to get apps to go into GUI death, go in weird states where there are like gray lines that swiping causes the gray lines to move up or down, blank white boxes where interface elements otherwise would be

Here's my current bit of hell. The button bar has been changed into a "taskbar". The critical android navigation buttons get shunted to the side. (Which side is not consistent; it flips left and right at seeming random.) The additional space is taken up by little app icons, like the iOS dock.

What makes this unacceptable is *the side shunted navigation buttons vary*. On the home screen, they're centered like normal.

**The navigation buttons simulate physical buttons. They should NEVER move.**

Sources on Internet claim under Settings->Display there's a setting to turn off "Taskbar". It's not present on my system. So I think: Maybe I can just remove all the items from the bar. I find settings for "show recent apps in taskbar" and "recommended apps in taskbar". I disable them. That leaves only the "quick launch" bar from the home screen. I try removing all the icons from that.

*The quick launch bar, and the "taskbar", grow a noninteractive gray square in the space where apps would go*

So I have a non-optional bar at the bottom of the screen. What is the purpose of the bar? To contain a noninteractive gray square. Why is the noninteractive gray square there? Because otherwise the bar at the bottom of the screen would be empty. This is Android's Emotional Support Square.

Meanwhile, the Android nav buttons, to accommodate this, move randomly between left, right & center. I cannot use the Android nav buttons, *critical for basic use of the device*, without looking at the screen.

In my entirely sincere, non-joking opinion, any GUI that I have to look at in order to use is a bad GUI.

I should be able to use any computer program by just clicking and tapping on things, without having to look to see whether the things are there or not.

So here's where it gets bugfuck. Unable to use the nav bar because Google has decided it must randomly move around as a minigame, I sadly enable gestures.

A gray bar appears at the bottom of my screen.

To show me where to do the gestures.

I only??? Enabled??? Gestures???? In the first place?????? To make a gray bar at the bottom of the screen go away???????????

Why is this here??? No, I know why this is here. It's here because the iPhone has it. The iPhone put at the bar at the bottom of the screen, and the execs at Google who decide what goes in Android don't *use* Android, they have iPhones, so the only direction anyone on Android gets is "make it look like my iPhone". And once it looks like their iPhones, they have no further extra concerns, such as "is it pleasant to use?" "Do the users mind a permanent, pointless gray mark defacing their screen?"

I. Want. To. Read. Books. This tablet is not a computer. This tablet is a book. My family has purchased books which are locked in the Amazon ecosystem. I want to read the books using a book interface, that is, I want a rectangle with words and/or images on it. I don't want a rounded rect or a circle. I don't want holes in my book. I don't want it to be defaced with black marks, or blank gray boxes containing blank white boxes, or a little bar containing the time. I just want a book.

How much of a problem this is depends on what app I'm in. Kindle (left), blessedly, puts black bars at the top and bottom and disables the clock bar and anti-navigation bar at the bottom, so I get what I want: a rectangle.. But say, Shonen Jump (right) doesn't, so I get a jangle of bars of various sizes and colors, and the screenshot doesn't capture this but the top bar has a clock, battery, wifi strength, and for no reason whatsoever, three dots and a triangle (these do nothing)

Although I like this form factor better than the Fire I was considering getting instead (I wish it were 8x11 sized instead of 16x9 sized, but the larger size is better for my eyes), I'm at this moment considering returning this simply to avoid the gray bar at the bottom of the screen. Apparently if you buy a tablet from *Google*, there's a "disable taskbar" feature in the Settings. Lenovo, for no reason anyone understands, removed this. Check Google and you'll find hundreds of annoyed comments.

This is surprising to me. Based on my experience with their Windows PCs, I assumed Lenovo would be a v basic Android OEM and not fuck with shit like, say, Samsung would. In fact, the Settings on this device claims it isn't even running Android, but "Lenovo ZUI 16.0.070 Stable". This appears to be just Android, but with pen support (the pen support is nice) and *multiple* missing features in the settings (not just the taskbar).

I was expecting Lenovo to disappoint me but wasn't expecting *that*.

Based on that, despite again the form factor and weight distribution and price all being quite good, I currently recommend avoiding the Lenovo Tab M11, because in addition to their Android repackaging being very buggy in strange ways they just fucking delete shit out of Android at random, and how are you supposed to predict whether one of the things they deleted is one of the things you depend on?

I guess tomorrow I'll try to see how much of a normal Android experience I can recreate using ADB.

Ok, I'm complaining a lot but one last thing. I want to show you what I mean by Lenovo's patched Android being "Buggy".

I bring down Quick Settings. There's a little "edit" button in the corner. I want to configure my Q.S., so I tap it (it's small, it takes a couple tries). This takes me to

A gray line.

Q.S. is replaced with a gray line. I can move it down and up but I can't go back. I can no longer access Q.S. or my notifications. The only way to get out of this state is to *reboot*. Really.

As you can see in the video, closing + reopening the quick settings/notification shade doesn't fix it. Only reboot fixes it.

Nowwww, I guess I should admit: While experimenting with this behavior, I found it's not an out of box behavior. Rather, it is a behavior specific to "disable animations" accessibility mode, which I run enabled. So this is *less* of a jaw-dropping QA process slip than it appears.

But wow! "Enabling accessibility options can softlock the OS" is kinda a bad failure mode!!

UPDATE: Ahh… well as you can see I got my tablet problems fixed. This is great

Okay one thing I will say about this damn Tab M11 is that the speaker is actually *quite* good. This might just be my primary way of listening to Tidal now.

Bass stood up mediocre at best to the Roni Size Matter of Fact test but eh, what do you expect

Okay so going at the "can I get the NORMAL NAV BUTTONS INSTEAD OF HAVING THEM REPEATEDLY MOVE LEFT AND RIGHT" problem (which I really might just return this tablet if I can't figure it out) now

It's hard to search for because tons of people try to enable the taskbar on a *phone* but I appear the first person to want to *disable* it, I assume because I'm the first person who cares about computers who has ever purchased an Android tablet. Possibly the first person to buy an Android tablet period.

Also on every tablet NOT made by lenovo, there's just plain a "disable taskbar" option. So why would anyone be asking about this.

The closest to people asking about this are all Samsung users who say they fixed a problem similar to this with the "Good Lock" app. But that is Samsung exclusive?

I do some checks with adb shell settings list (https://gist.github.com/mcclure/47341511a2b91a1e64eb8a61b2f9ac4a) I find two settings in the "system" namespace that look germane but aren't it, and three mystery settings in the "secure" namespace

The two settings in "global" are the ones that Lenovo exposes to me— they're already off and aren't important. I guess the most helpful thing here would be if someone with a non-Lenovo Android tablet could try doing `adb shell settings list system` and `adb shell settings list secure` before and after toggling the Settings ➜ Display ➜ Taskbar option, and diffing the results. (Or just grepping both for "task" and eyeballing it.) However this seems unlikely since again, nobody uses Android tablets

Incidentally, another thing I'd consider an option— although not necessarily my preferred option— is if I could go with the gesture navigation, but change it so the back gesture is something other than a side-pull, or like a side-pull and hold or something. I cannot function without having my side-pull gesture inside of apps, plus in my testing left swipes nowhere near the border get interpreted as back gestures.

Some "posts" refer to a "swipe gesture sensitivity" setting but idk what this is.

Incidentally, a friend with an old Samsung mentions their Samsung has this second option for nav gestures, where the three standard nav bar buttons are replaced with three swipe-up-from-bottom areas. For the tablet environment, that is actually really nice! I would enable that if I could! It is apparently 100% Samsung exclusive and also, on the newer Samsungs it's been removed.

*Gosh*, I wish Android were actually open source.

The Android evil-genie promise: You may have an open source phone OS. But if you actually compile it from source yourself, you will be banned from running any software. Or at least, they'll try as hard as they can to ban you from running software. Also, if you decide you want to build or even *download* the source, you're going to need to purchase a dedicated 1 TB SSD to check out the repo, and also download our forked version of git to check it out with

Note: You may argue I'm being unfair to Android by saying you need a dedicated 1TB drive to check out the source tree with, when in fact, the AOSP instructions https://source.android.com/docs/setup/start/requirements say only *400 GB* is required to check out and build the repo. However IMO, for any serious project you'll eventually want 2 live checkouts, in case you want to compare 2 branches side by side. Also you'll need space for Android Studio, which on every computer I've ever installed it on took up "all the space I had"

The most frustrating thing about these problems I'm having is they ultimately come down to "Android lets userland have *some* freedom, but you're not allowed to replace the nav bar". & it's infuriating because *Android used to allow this*. There used to be an entire ecosystem of "hide nav bar then add a custom nav bar replacement/gesture system". Around Android 10 Google summarily blocked this. And now I'm maybe gonna return a perfectly good tablet just because Lenovo botched their navbar tweaks

(Also, for the record, the feature they killed that allowed navbars to exist was *also* the same feature that would have allowed me to escape my most hated thing about modern phones: Rounded screen corners. Used to you could shrink the screen and add black bars at the edges, which would have allowed me to shrink the screen past the curves and have what I want, have a rectangular screen. Google finds this entirely unacceptable.)

(I *think* the reason Google did this is because they realized that if people were able to customize or replace the nav bar, they might wind up disabling Google Assistant or— horror of horrors!— replacing Google Assistant with an alternative made by a competitor. That had to be stopped, so the alt-navbar economy had to be executed, and the way they did this was killing `wm overscan`, so this meant also taking away my ability to hack my screen to be rectangular. Infuriating.)

I am being informed my Google conspiracy theory makes no sense because Android allows you to replace Google Assistant with an alternate Assistant by simply installing one. Except waitif that's the case, why does Google make it so hard to turn Assistant *off*?!

Wondering if I should make a "Null Assistant" that when invoked does nothing but immediately quit, then enable it, so I can stop being bothered by the various offers to re-enable Assistant that Google litters around the OS like land mines

Status on the tablet, and the horrible baffling "taskbar" feature that breaks the navbar:

I appear to be fucked.

I got a volunteer to measure `adb.exe shell settings list` before and after enabling "taskbar" on a non-Lenovo. My aim was to figure out what preference Lenovo removed the switch for. We found nothing. I went to XDA. XDA doesn't even have forums for the Lenovo Tab line. I guess I need to reverse engineer which of these 42 devices is most similar to a Lenovo Tab M11, and beg in there

The rule of XDA of course is that the more obscure your device is the less likely there is to be anyone in the relevant subforum, so I don't think I'm going to connect productively even if I figure out which of these various mishmashes of letters and numbers corresponds to my device.

Legitimately, I can't use this device if I have to play a game of "have you moved the navbar to the left, right or center?" every time I switch apps or books. I'm looking at returning it and buying an equivalent Samsung. Of course, now I'm re-entering the shopping phase, which took forever the first time. And perhaps the Samsung, once I've picked one, will *also* have a "it's perfect except once every ten minutes it releases a bee and the bee stings you" feature, and I'll have solved nothing.

*Takes a deep breath until her lungs burst*

Okay. I… okay. Before I gave up I was gonna try one more thing, but I didn't think it would work, because it was so… dumb.

The problem is not that the navbar is drawn off-center. The problem is the navbar *moves*. Sometimes it's in a corner, sometimes it's in the center. I can get it to move corners with a tap, but that's not the problem. The problem is that *in the launcher*, the navbar is big and centered, like it always is on other tablets (1/2)

So here was my "dumb" thought: Is it that the navbar is centered in the *launcher*? Or is it the navbar is centered in the *Google launcher*?

What happens if I install an alternate launcher? I don't want an alternate launcher, the default is fine. But if I *did* install an alternate launcher, would Android think that is "app" and not a "launcher"? And if it's an "app", would the navbar be drawn on the side, like it is in apps, instead of in the center?

So I tried it and… it… … it worked. (2/2)

The whole time I've been complaining about this, people have been like have you tried an alternate launcher? And I'm like you don't get it, the problem isn't the launcher, the launcher's fine, the problem is the navbar. Except it turns out that installing a launcher, by itself, regardless of what the launcher is, "fixes" the problem.

I… *head in hands* Everything about this is so weird. I want the hours I spent trying to debug this with ADB back.

This isn't a *great* solution. Nova Launcher is a *little* clunky (why are the Kindle and Tusky icons drawn inside other icons?) (I do like it lets me search the Play store direct from local app search). It does really really bother me the navbar buttons are off-center, just because I don't like the screen being asymmetrical, for the same reason it perpetually bothers me when the screen edges are curved [a reason I won't discuss in front of 16,000 Mastodon followers]. But… maybe… I'll… live.

The final remaining oddity is that inexplicable white square in the center bottom of the screen, the white square that I can't remove and that does literally nothing. It might bother me more than the off-center buttons. I am now considering creating an Android app which has an icon the exact color of the nav bar, which when launched does nothing except quit to the home screen. That is really, really silly. Maybe it's less work than returning the darn thing and buying a Galaxy I won't like either

@mcc "That inexplicable white square in the center bottom of the screen" is probably launcher's app icon, since OS is treating the launcher like an app.