Google has been very busy with their expansion of Android as a platform this year. At Google IO we saw the announcement of endeavors like Android TV and Android Auto. But the stars of the show were a preview of the next version of Android, code named Android L, and Google's new Material Design principles for interface design across all of their products. In the years since Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich released, we've seen the launch of Jellybean and KitKat, but both of these versions were very iterative improvements upon 4.0 and had equally iterative version numbers with Jellybean being major versions 4.1 through 4.3 and KitKat being 4.4. Lollipop is given the major version number of 5.0, and it's quite fitting as it's arguably the biggest advancement to Android in a long time. It comes with an entirely new interface based on Material Design, a new application runtime, and many new features that I could not hope to summarize in this paragraph. 

It can be difficult to begin a review of Android, as the definition of what Android is can be very dynamic. Android as an operating system that performs a set of functions is fairly well defined, but it's nearly impossible to define what Android looks like based on how it appears on most smartphones. The interface that Google has created for Android has matured greatly from its original iterations, but OEMs continue to put their own interfaces on top of Android to differentiate their devices. What applications are part of Android is also an interesting question. We can look to what applications are included in AOSP, but truth be told even Nexus users with "stock Android" aren't really getting an AOSP experience.

That may not be a bad thing for users, because many AOSP applications are quite bare compared to the Google applications that have superseded them. However, it poses a problem when deciding what should be discussed in a review of Android, and it has implications relating to how much of "Android" truly is open source. Google has also moved many applications over to Google Play so applications can be updated independently of the operating system, which bypasses many of the concerns about fragmentation from the days when application updates would come with Android updates that a user might never get. This adds an additional level of consideration when deciding which of these Google Play applications should be considered part of Android and discussed during a review.

For the purposes of this review specifically, I've attempted to take a look at most of the applications that come pre-loaded on a Nexus device which includes applications like Gmail that other people may contend are not actually part of Android due to them not being part of AOSP. It should also be noted that Google has been updating their applications to have a Material Design interface since it was originally revealed at Google IO, and some of the earliest updated applications have been excluded from the review as users are already very familiar with how they look an act by this point. We have covered many of these over the course of the year, and so readers who wish to see changes that were made to apps like Gmail and Google Sheets can look to our past coverage from when those applications were updated. To begin the review, we need to explain exactly what it means for something to have Material Design.

Material Design
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  • Poik - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link

    It looks nice and coherent but I wish there was an option for inverted Colors as that would or could make a difference in battery life for those of us with OLED screens. The white everywhere is nice and clean but is also far more prone to being washed out in my experience.
  • nevertell - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link

    I for one welcome (our bright minded LCD overlords) the new design, as I am really tired looking at the dark and gloomy pre-Lollipop styling. And you can't really be mad at Google who is always trying to make the android experience consistent across all devices, and your OEM is free to change the colour scheme as far as I am aware.
  • Murloc - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link

    heh windows phone wins with OLEDs.
    They should definitely provide an alternative color scheme.
  • tralalalalalala40 - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link

    Don't make google cater to the oled users. Why do people bring this up? Is the purpose of OLED devices to use the screen as little as possible? lol
  • tuxRoller - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link

    Settings->accessibility->color inversion

    You're welcome:)
  • Gadgety - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link

    Lollipop. Far too many bright and cheerful battery wasting images. My kid got Lollipop to the phone but doesn't want to install it, because it will "change everything" and going back to 4.4 is a hassle. In short she's satisfied with 4.4 but doesn't see what will be gained with 5.0.

    Where did personalization and tailor making go - the original reason to get Android over iOS? Apparently the calendar only has 5 day weeks. I guess this will improve in future iterations, but in some areas Lollipop apparently presents a step backwards.
  • xenol - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link

    This is the problem whenever you change your UI. Everyone thinks the UI is the only change that happened, disregarding anything else (like AOT instead of JIT for application performance).

    Like in Windows 8. There were a few things that I found under the hood (and some of them blatant) that I liked and were the reason for keeping it as my main OS, but everyone else harped on Metro.

    At least with Lollipop, they didn't change much in the way of the user interface paradigms. But alas, too many loud mouths will constantly bash the look of something and not really understand the meat of it.
  • Gadgety - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link

    What about the vegetables?
  • tralalalalalala40 - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link

    How dare you mention the 2 unmentionable days of the week.
  • Gadgety - Monday, December 1, 2014 - link

    So step by step Google will reformulate my experience. I want to be in charge of my phone, rather than Google, or Samsung. Google mixes brilliant with appalling.

    @tralalalalalala40 I stand corrected.

    It's like the Keep app - great for entering data, abhorrent for structuring it. Of course one can always fall back on that Google function par excellence - search. By handing data to us like this, we become dependent on the search, and Google will know more and more about our habits, which is how they make their money. Datamining is where it's at.

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