If, by better, you mean more locked down, and with incremental tweaks, sure. I would much rather have Android from 5 years ago, and the ability to make it work how I want, than what there is now.

You still can have seen Android from 5 years ago experience. There's lots of custom ROMs for that. On the other hand, for an average person, I believe Android is better today in most ways.

They exist but I can't use them because I need my bank apps to work, and magisk can only trick some of them.

Most of the 'new' features in Android over the past 5 years have been available in custom ROMs during that entire time. While there are, indeed, minor improvements for the average user, it's been very minor, and leaves you wondering why they didn't have it in the first place (or it's exclusive to Pixel or some shit like that).

And the average person won't even notice most of the new features/improvements; perhaps the biggest one is the camera, and that's all done in hardware or AI these days, which is not Android per-se than a photography app (which, again, is usually a Pixel exclusive)

I don't know about deep level impressive but I'm finding the new Google Lens thing built recently into Chrome pretty cool and useful. You click it and highlight part of the page and then it figures what the image is or ocr's text in it and optional translates or searches it. I use it multiple times per day. Also just being able to do that was a bit sci-fi 15 years ago.

Deep level impressive but maybe just by a company owned by Google is the Deepmind stuff like AlphaFold which recently got a nobel prize and AlphaGo and MuZero. Also you may have heard of the chatgpt/llm stuff that's trendy now, all based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_arc...

+1 for Lens - It can translate manga in near-real time.

Google Photos

Has anything serious changed about photos in the last 15 years? I've used it before then and can't really think of anything apart from embedding search and random reminders. But those are really small features.

Well Google photos wasn't released 10 years ago, so ... that at least?

Unless you're thinking of Picasa, which is a whole different conversation lol

I mean, afaik the standout feature of Picasa was shared web albums where you could invite people to add photos and permissions were managed via Google accounts, so, it's easy to confuse the two. From memory the only thing that changed when moving from Picasa to Photos was that I no longer had a desktop app where to keep photos on disk + Picasa had a neat map of geolocations (maybe Photos caught up or can you still not view photos on a map? I know apple does this, I just use ACDSee now and keep it offline)

Sunsetting blog from 2016 for good measure: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-pica...

Yeah, I'm treating Picassa as Photos 1.0. Apart from the stand-alone app it's basically a continuation with data migrated by default.

Google photos is awesome. I genuinely love it, I've been uploading my old travel photos to it and every few days my phone reminds me of some old memories.

Hard disagree, I used Android for years but after they removed feature after feature that I found useful, and replaced them with features that shovelled ads at me, I finally gave up and switch to iOS.

I think the last straw was when I was forced to replace the stock launcher just to avoid the built in unblockable google search ads. That made me consider why I bothered with Google at all anymore if all I do is hacks to work around their crappy ad filled UI.

You mean the Google sidebar in the Pixel launcher with Google News that replaced Google Now? Yeah, that was awful. But you could disable it in either the launcher settings or the Google app itself. I'm glad I'm on GrapheneOS now.

I recommend Microsoft's Launcher, it's simple and gets out of your way. Similarly, Edge's search widget just launches a browser and executes your search. This really should be the stock behaviour that Google should provide.

The number one feature I use Google Assistant for (and probably most people's most common usage) is to say "Hey google, set a timer for X minutes". If I dare do anything else with my phone during it's reply of "OK, five minutes, starting now" I risk the timer just... disappearing. If I can't count on it for one of the most commonly used tasks for phones I have zero faith for other things and don't even bother to figure out how to use it as more than an internet access terminal/music player.

> Android is getting genuinely better.

that’s really something you don’t read often

They bought that though.

> Android is getting genuinely better

At what ? Stealing user data ?

They are still not able to arrange some widgets on the screen and to underestand that, if an app does not have microphone permission, you don't need a bloody microphone widget on the screen.