I won’t talk about what should be changed as the material website linked above is enough. However, I have to mention that the close button was intentionally removed in PR #12280 to fix issue #11121, following PR #11085.
That was 4 years ago. Google Calendar (the reference app in #11121) looks like this now:
[There wasn’t a fab menu the first time I opened it for some reason.]
As for Discord, I’m not sure what David was referring to, but I can’t find it anymore in the latest version of the app, and googling it only returned negative feedback.
Also, lukstbit showed their dislike of the change in this comment and sanjaysargam reported the change as a bug in issue #14000.
I’d say that PR #12280 made closing the FAB menu unintuitive and didn’t really improve the speed of adding new notes: you have to tap outside the red region below to close the FAB menu.
TL;DR: thank you!! If you feel strongly about this (and I suspect you do, given the research you’ve put in), feel free to add an issue to move back to the “X” button, but we won’t move to Material Expressive yet.
Double tapping the FAB is a feature which I personally love, and I’ll be sad to see it be removed, but your point is well-reasoned.
Technically, moving to this Material Expressive component would mean that we’d need to introduce a dependency on a UI Framework called Jetpack Compose.
AnkiDroid should move to Compose (it’s Google’s big new shiny), but the project is stretched extremely thin with maintainer/code reviewer time.
One of the things I’ve fought hard against over the years is leaving technological migrations unfinished. A proper migration to Compose could slow AnkiDroid development down for years, (and it’s not unlikely that I’ll be taking on a lot of the burden of this conversion).
Migrating piecemeal is possible, but starting is a commitment I don’t want to take lightly as the migration to Kotlin took years.
This year, AnkiDroid will hopefully reach parity with Anki Desktop in terms of features. Let’s revisit a UI overhaul once we’re there, I’ll feel much happier discussing stalling development if we’ve got the big features out the way. The UI IS important, and we should do better, but I don’t think it’s more important than improving tag management.
Just to confirm: moving back to the (X) does NOT require the upgrade to Material Expressive (hence why I encouraged you to add an issue if you wanted), but we won’t get the new style of menu until we upgrade
