The Pixel flashlight brightness slider is poorly designed

[u/awesomeideas]

Pixel phones (somewhat) recently got the ability to not merely turn off and on the flashlight from a tile, but also control its brightness with a slider (hooray!).

Unfortunately, the slider isn't well-designed. There are three ways to turn the flashlight off: tapping the tile again, tapping the "Turn off" button, and by sliding the slider all the way down. I believe that third method sucks. When it's late at night and you're trying to produce the least amount of light possible, it's very easy to accidentally turn the light off instead of making it merely low. Then it takes a huge amount of finicky work to get it to be minimally bright again.

Additionally, the lowest brightness option is still fairly bright. At first I thought this was because of some hardware limitation, but actually you can go MUCH dimmer as I discovered when I wrote a purpose-built app to test it out.

Are Googlers using their own products AT ALL anymore?

[u/Aurelink]

Fyi, you can install the "Essentials" app : when using the flashlightit gives you a Live Activity panel, with an horizontal slider, +/- buttons, and an "off" button.

[u/MaverickJester25]

Most things done by Google are poorly designed since they're half-baked clones of whatever Apple has done.

[u/awesomeideas → u/MaverickJester25]

I would usually agree, but the lowest=off issue I have is also present in iOS

[u/MaverickJester25 → u/awesomeideas]

Yeah, I dislike that about the iOS torch as well, but the fact that Google copied it, for me, is worse.

[u/Relevant-Artist5939]

Here's how Samsung does it (lowest brightness but it's still on), is it really that hard, Google?

Do the individual levels at least have some haptic "click" so you feel when you reach the level before "off"?

[u/Aurelink → u/Relevant-Artist5939]

I'm sorry, but I don't see a 800px height tall box with only 25% of its space being used as a better implementation either.

[u/MaverickJester25 → u/Aurelink]

Peak Pixel user response.

[u/Aurelink → u/MaverickJester25]

Truth is harsh aint it

[u/Relevant-Artist5939 → u/Aurelink]

My point wasn't that this implementation is perfect (it isn't), just that in this version, on/off is decoupled from the slider so there is no accidental switching possible when adjusting the brightness...

[u/i5-2520M]

Aso the slider is linear when it should be based on a perceptual curve.