Yeah that is such an amazing anti-feature. And how do you deal with changes? Like, when does 1 day ago become 2 days ago? According to google it becomes two days ago after 48 hours. That means if you look at your phone after 47 hours it will say 1 day ago and you'll be tricked into it happening yesterday. Human readable my ass.
Or, you know the specific day because it was the day after your friends birthday or whatever. And you try to find a specific item, but you have to sift through an entire months of shit because all the information you get is "three months ago".
The intent make sense (humans are better at durations than with absolute timestamps), but the lack of granularity is ridiculous. It should be "1d 20h ago" or based on the dates in question maybe more or less granual. (It's a hard UX problem, but that just means that the program ought to know what the user wants. What's important to them. Are the searching for something? What patterns to highlight? Ie. if there's a directory with a 1000 files but only 2 old ones maybe put some emphasis on them, etc.)
I utterly hate this on iOS. Suddenly after an hour or something, you irretrievably lose the time on a notification. There’s not even some fiddly power user way to force it to show you.
Or, you know the specific day because it was the day after your friends birthday or whatever. And you try to find a specific item, but you have to sift through an entire months of shit because all the information you get is "three months ago".