7
exerceo
160d

Is Google trying to win a "who can create the shittiest file picker" award?

The file picker of Android OS can not even remember the last selected sorting options, and its default sorting is alphabetical. Does anyone really use alphabetical sorting? Sorting by the last modified time or by size is far more useful than alphabetical sorting can ever hope being.

The only use for alphabetical sorting is sorting files with incorrect time stamp attribute but a correct time stamp or number in the file name.

The file picker of Android OS also features pull-to-refresh. As already said, pull-to-refresh is not a helpful shortcut but a useless anti-feature. ( https://devrant.com/rants/9831669/... ) Why would anyone need to refresh in a file picker? How likely is a file to not exist before opening the file picker and then appear while browsing for the file? All pull-to-refresh does here is draining the phone battery by reloading the thumbnails.

The file search feature of the Google file picker can only search the entire storage. A search can not be limited to the currently viewed directory. Even the file picker of Windows Vista from 2007 could search only the viewed directory.

Obviously, it lacks any kind of range selection. No A-to-B selection that is like shift-click selection on desktop, and not even the inferior drag-to-select that Samsung has implemented, which would still be better than annoying individual selection.

Microsoft could build a better file picker at a time some of us were in primary school than Google can build today. Come on, Google, just scrap your garbage software and go copycat Microsoft. Useful plagiarized software is better than useless self-made garbage.

At least the Google file picker does one thing right: It remembers the last directory the user picked a file from and opens it next time.

Comments
  • 3
    (edit time elapsed, so posting as comment)

    Obviously, it also lacks a scrollbar, and the grid view only shows two thumbnails per row in vertical view and four thumbnails per row in horizontal view.

    There is no option to zoom out to show more items at once.
  • 2
    Regarding pull to refresh:
    I also dislike it if it’s used incorrectly.
    It does make sense for things like news feeds where the new items appear at the top:
    You drag the screen down, because you want to see more new stuff above.
    The devrant feed is a good example.
    However, the comments section shouldn’t have pull to refresh because new comments appear at the bottom.

    It’s concerning that even trained UI/UX designers just use pull to refresh everywhere by default.
    I had many discussions about that in our team.
  • 1
    @Lensflare A refresh button can be just half a second away. And if some people really really want to have pull-to-refresh, just create an option to turn it off.

    This is what Google failed to do in 2019 when they made pull-to-refresh mandatory in Chrome for Android.
  • 1
    @exerceo I agree, but sadly pull to refresh is seen as more modern UI and a refresh button has the disadvantage of taking up screen space. Designers struggle with them because they don’t know where to put them and they "destroy" the aesthetic of the screen design.
  • 1
    @Lensflare And pull-to-refresh destroys the workflow and takes effort and energy to avoid.

    No more relaxed upscrolling. Always watch out to avoid triggering pull-to-refresh. All that for the sake of complying with a foolish design trend.
  • 2
    It allows you to pick a different file picker. Google is a search engine and website that's maintaining several OSes, custom hardware, a quantum physics laboratory, a few social networks and selling its internal business management suite and IT infrastructure. Some of it is bound to suck, their company culture and management style cannot possibly be the best fit for all those things. At least they allow third party components in many places, including file pickers.
  • 2
    @lorentz Indeed. However, third-party file pickers can not be made default and are shunned away in the sidebar of the Google file picker.

    When regarding the history of Google, there is a risk of them getting rid of third-party file pickers as well.

    A company that has a quantum physics laboratory should easily be capable of building a proper file picker on one of their most popular products, Android OS.
  • 2
    This stupid file picker on Android fucking sucks!!! It displays no previews whatsoever, takes a hot second with empty initialization screen and sidebar. Also, this shite can't be replaced with something that sucks less in browser, other apps, that's why some modern apps cope and make their own internal file pickers that DON'T MAKE US WAIT.
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