With Android 4.4 KITKAT, Google brought a ton of changes. Most of those were new features and under-the-hood goodness, but Google also brought a few significant aesthetic changes that had some people a little uneasy. For starters, they eliminated the blue and decided that white was going to be the one, and only, color for things like keyboard text, status bar text and icons, and the trace trail inside the keyboard.
Another key change Google made was moving the network status indicators from the status bar to within the quick settings toggle menu. A lot of people might not have ever noticed it on their current phones, but the arrows on the network icon (whether you were on 4G/3G or WiFi) would light up whenever bits of data were being transferred — up is upload, and down is download, natch. Beyond that, the network icon would turn gray whenever access to the Google Cloud Messaging service was not available (that is, the protocol that handles push notifications through Google’s system).
These weren’t just random changes, though, as Google’s Dan Sandler thankfully reminds us that everything happens for a reason. In the comments thread for this Google+ post, Sandler gives a pretty in-depth explanation about it all. Long story short?
A more neutral color scheme makes it so that the OS doesn’t clash much with an app’s custom look, and the network indicators were confusing for a lot of casual users, so they tucked it into a secondary menu where the geeks can find them (if they really need them).
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