[lynndotpy]

Maybe you dislike them, but that does not make for a fact.

Instant transitions are something I strongly prefer and use in practice. There's no question, I don't want my operating system slowing itself down to a factor (literally) of 1000x, pointlessly fading and jiggling and sliding and bouncing and wiggling. And, as this article points out, animations in operating systems often make a visually illegible mess in the meanwhile.

Animations might be a good idea in theory, but it doesn't seem like anyone has figured out how to do them right.

[cwillu]

Indeed: one of the first things I do on a new android phone is activate developer mode specifically so that I can set the animation timescale to 0×.

[Kiro]

Which the majority of people think is a horrible experience. There's even a sibling comment in this thread pointing that out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48518721

[lynndotpy]

Unless you can back that up, "Majority" is something you're making up. It's a guess.

It also doesn't matter whether it's true if the majority or not- "Instant transitions are only good in theory" is not a true statement. Instant transitions are good in practice for many people and that has been true for decades.

[Liftyee]

I see Kiro's guess and raise you an anecdote. I just turned animations off on my Android device, and instantly it feels faster and more responsive.

Maybe software programs got faster with our faster CPUs but all the animations just made everything feel slow.

[lynndotpy]

Yes! It feels faster and more responsive now because it is faster and more responsive now. Your device is taking less time to do the same work.

[Kiro]

Most people with that opinion keep using apps and devices with animations, but thinking it would be better without them. Very few actually torture themselves like that in practice.

[toast0]

I thought I had disabled animations on android, but it looks like I have it set for half duration.

Probably because I had run into some apps with bugs when animations are disabled, and making them run twice as fast as normal is more compatible and reduce the annoyance enough that I forget its enabled. Apps that animate at normal speed in defiance of my settings get deleted.

But I also set windows not to show window content while moving or resizing, because I find that to be annoying too.

Reducing duration or eliminating animation is one of the first settings I do on a new install.

[lynndotpy]

For me, animations are the torture, and I am most productive on machines that aren't artificially hobbled with animations one can't turn off.

Your experiences are not universal.

[mrob]

Most people aren't even aware that it's possible to turn them off.

[Groxx]

Most shoulder-surfers who see my phone ask me how everything's so fast, and get me to show them the settings. Being able to disable the extremely-excessive animations many things have nowadays is fantastic, and is a great reminder that hardware actually has made progress in the past two decades.

(I use accessibility -> reduce motion, personally. less flaky than the dev options, though also less reliable)

[Kiro]

Finally someone not roleplaying. You're the first person who acknowledges the flakiness of the dev options. People are self-reporting when they claim they set it to 0x without realizing it's unusable due to the bugs.

[lynndotpy]

Denigrating others as "roleplaying" is unnecessary and not serious.

AOSP is not the only operating system that allows you to disable animations, even if its implementation is not the best. And yes, I still use 0x on my Android, because it's still that much better than having animations enabled.

[Groxx]

It mostly works fine, I ran with it for a year or so. Actually needing to disable it is extremely app-specific and rare enough that many people probably never experience it (it's essentially always a sign of buggy code).

Though it does kinda often make inertial scroll/pan very bad feeling, as it jumps ahead of where you released, to where it will settle. "Reduce motion" is dramatically better there, which is a big part of why I use it.

Much MUCH more problematic is that Android (on a Pixel) has had a badly broken "recent apps" view for years now, when you have both a third party launcher and reduce motion enabled. It frequently (literally most of the time) gets stuck in its animations and won't scroll anywhere except to leap to the start or end of the list.

[cwillu]

Perhaps you should note the replies to that sibling comment

[Kiro]

Setting animations to 0x is famously broken on Android with the UI jumping up and down on transitions. It's a litmus test to spot people falsely claiming they have it disabled without realizing it outs them.

[lynndotpy]

You continue making unsubstantiated claims with loaded terms, denigrating others by accusing them of being dishonest when just stating their preferences.

It's not a litmus test, you are simply wrong in the way you dismiss other people.

Some of us like it at 0x, even when some apps are janky. Further, plenty of us here use desktop operating systems. Android is not the only way to get on the internet.

Both Windows (at least as of 10 and before) and most Linux distros allow you to disable animations too, and it works fine. Desktop operating systems ~15+ years ago lacked these animations entirely.

[gf000]

Real life has everything "animated". Nothing happens in an instant, there is force required to accelerate mass, etc.

Short, well-done animations make for better UIs.

[lynndotpy]

This might be true, but the operating systems with animations you can't disable aren't short and they aren't well done.

[mrob]

You're not operating the GUI by thought alone, so your muscles already provide the animation. Adding additional animation on top of that is unnatural.

[Hendrikto]

> Short, well-done

This is the neglected key point. None of the examples were short or well-done.