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I know it sounds counterintuitive, but I regularly get the feeling that Google doesn't dogfood its products.




For many years I used the stock Android alarm clock and couldn't believe how it was designed.

When the alarm goes off in the morning, I'm half asleep still, my eyes are blurry, and when I look at the phone to snooze the alarm, it has two tiny, tiny, like 15x15 pixel buttons with random icons, no text, on both sides of the screen - one button disables the alarm and the other snoozes.

There's no way in that tired, near blind, state that I could tell or process what I was looking at and would effectively end up just pressing a random button and hoping I remembered by instinct which one was snooze. It really felt like no one had ever actually used/tested the alarm.

In a recent OS update they changed it so that now it has two, much bigger buttons, which clearly state "SNOOZE" and "STOP", they finally changed it, but for all those years it was just atrocious.


The alarm on / off toggle buttons on the Clock -> Alarm screen also have a tiny hit-zone and if you miss it kindly opens a screen for you to adjust the alarm time. Hit back, try again, miss again...

I just want to turn my alarm off for a lie-in and I have to play button-sniper.


They also removed swiping, so that you have to tap a button, and it's throwing me off.

Volume buttons have snoozed alarms in every phone I've ever had. I can find those by feel.

AFAIK there’s a lot of truth to this, there are a good chunk of Google employees with iPhones but less Apple employees with androids

Why would they, just rely on telemetry and data analysis. The users are the testers.



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