Help So how is it different?

[Android Question]

Surely in not the first to wonder this; but how is lollipop so much different and better than KitKat?

I have waited, and waited, and waited, waited some more and waited again on this godforsaken update. It's taken over a year to roll out and reach the point of moderate stability and at long last, I FINALLY got lollipop.

But after all that hassle, what exactly makes it different from what I had?

Oh all I've heard about is the Material design. It's a complete revolution. It's the biggest change to Android since Ice Cream Sandwich. Am I missing something?
About the only difference I see is lockscreen notifications.

Compared to the Holo UI of 4.X, Material looks exactly like Holo. The only for is the color scheme. Instead of black, everything is white. All the menus, animations, gestures look and behave exactly like KitKat. The only discernable difference I see is the lockscreen and the drop down menu.
The taskview cards? KitKat did the same thing.

 

[Hadron]

You haven't said what device you have, and different manufacturers add more or fewer changes of their own to the base OS. So a Nexus with Lollipop looks more different from KitKat than say a HTC would.

Changes are often under the hood rather than in the UI, e.g. the change of runtime environment from dalvik to ART.

Personally I use custom software to get rid of the task view cards - I find the rolodex thing both ugly and inefficient, with the latter being unforgivable.

 

[mikedt]

Surely in not the first to wonder this; but how is lollipop so much different and better than KitKat?

I have waited, and waited, and waited, waited some more and waited again on this godforsaken update. It's taken over a year to roll out and reach the point of moderate stability and at long last, I FINALLY got lollipop.

But after all that hassle, what exactly makes it different from what I had?

Oh all I've heard about is the Material design. It's a complete revolution. It's the biggest change to Android since Ice Cream Sandwich. Am I missing something?
About the only difference I see is lockscreen notifications.

Compared to the Holo UI of 4.X, Material looks exactly like Holo. The only for is the color scheme. Instead of black, everything is white. All the menus, animations, gestures look and behave exactly like KitKat. The only discernable difference I see is the lockscreen and the drop down menu.
The taskview cards? KitKat did the same thing.

You haven't said what you've actually got, like if you were waiting for Verizon or AT&T or whatever to update your phone. If you had say a Nexus, you'd have had it a year ago, and might already be on Marshmallow 6.0 now.