Full-screen mode by default?

Continuing the discussion from Android: New User Experience: Overwhelming and Scary:

I don’t even remember if “full-screen mode” was on by default last time i installed the app. If it was, then it was probably one of the first things I changed in the settings.

I can agree with @Zian that is probably shouldn’t be on by default.

We want to avoid, new user experiencing:

I don’t see why full screen would be an issue as a lot of apps are full screen :thinking:

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Which common applications are you thinking of?

I checked all the Google Apps (Arm64, Android 9, stock) on my phone and only found 1 program that started out full screen (Camera).

Long boring list of other applications I checked:

  • Google Play Store
  • Search
  • Calendar
  • GMail
  • Google Now screen from the Google Now launcher
  • Wallpapers picker
  • Calculator
  • Clock
  • Maps
  • Messages
  • Photos
  • YouTube
  • Google Play Books
  • Chrome
  • Drive
  • Google News
  • Google Play Games
  • Contacts
  • Phone
  • Duo
  • Google Pay
  • Google Translate
  • Docs
  • Fit
  • Hangouts
  • Sheets
  • Slides
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I’m with @Zian on this one.

Full-screen should be an option, not default.

Once you’re on an Android with virtual bottom buttons, nigh-most apps – the Outlook app, for example – will go full screen at some point and you have to poke them to get the bottom buttons back. The stuff around the front camera notch doesn’t go away with those (though it does with sky maps like Stellarium).

I think “full screen” is being poorly defined here; the notion of the screen is increasingly virtual in recent Android, to the point where you need to run the moral equivalent of a window manager to get the bottom row buttons at all.

My own take on it is that Flowx is not doing anything surprising or unusual, especially for a data visualization app. I think much of the problem may be that people are looking at Flowx as a weather app, which, fundamentally, it is not. It’s a data visualization app that happens to be about weather. That’s what makes it interesting and useful, and it’s probably something to tell people up front. (So is “this is a powerful tool, and the power comes with a certain minimum complexity”. I think the main selling point is that the complexity is brilliantly handled, but it’s still there.)

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I may have been unclear. By “full screen”, I meant that Flowx hid the top bar with the time/notification icons. On my phone, the back home, and menu buttons act and look more like physical buttons that aren’t part of the main display area.

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Yes this is what the “full screen” setting in flowex normally does. (*)

I beleave @Oak refers to it as:


In addition to hideing the top row, on some devices, that have virtual menue bottom buttons, a full screen action can also trigger hideing

Some phones have physical buttons and don’t have the virtual menue bottom buttons, and some phones, like Motola have the “One button nav” option in “Moto Actions” that will permanently hide the virtual menue bottom buttons.


(* The latest beta release, have a new bug, that might confuse this matter more:
[Fixed] New full-screen bug in Beta 3.322)

it doesn’t stay full screen it’s just when you see select the 3 dot menu

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See [Fixed] New full-screen bug in Beta 3.322 - #3 by Ohan