The systems that only ever add
Most systems in this catalogue take things away as fast as they add them. Six have never taken anything away at all.
Nothing has ever left
| System | Arrived | Gone | Pairs |
|---|---|---|---|
| HyperOS | 130 | 0 | 1 |
| CarPlay | 102 | 0 | 4 |
| One UI | 86 | 0 | 1 |
| HarmonyOS | 82 | 0 | 1 |
| Symbian | 23 | 0 | 1 |
| watchOS | 8 | 0 | 1 |
431 settings arrived between them. None left.
CarPlay is the one that means something
Five of these are a single release pair, and one pair is not a habit. CarPlay is four pairs, and across all four it has never removed a row.
That fits what CarPlay is. A car is used by people who learned it once and then drove, often while the system is the least important thing they are paying attention to. Moving a setting in a phone costs someone a minute; moving one in a dashboard costs them a glance away from the road.
The cost of never removing
A system that never removes never breaks a habit. It also never cleans up, which is how settings trees reach the sizes described in settings menus only grow — iOS went from 443 rows to 4,555 in fourteen years.
The systems that do remove are making a trade: a shorter tree now against a reader who cannot find something they knew. Windows 11 removed 2,200 rows and is still the most complained-about reorganisation in this catalogue.
Look at any of them
Every pair is listed in the version comparison index. Open the systems themselves: CarPlay, HyperOS, One UI, HarmonyOS, watchOS.
The full picture: what actually changes between versions.
Try it yourself, on the real menusOpen any of 43 operating systems in your browser and walk the Settings tree exactly as it appears on the device. No download, no account.Frequently asked questions
Which operating systems never remove settings?
In our catalogue: HyperOS, CarPlay, One UI, HarmonyOS, Symbian and watchOS. Between them they added 431 rows across their release pairs and removed none.
Is never removing settings a good thing?
It depends what you value. Nothing a reader has learned stops working, which matters most in a car or on a watch. The cost is that the tree only ever grows, which is how a settings app reaches several thousand rows.
Why does CarPlay never remove anything?
We can only report that it has not across four release pairs. The plausible reason is that a dashboard is used by people whose attention is elsewhere, and a moved setting costs more there than it does on a phone.