The new notification modes of Lollipop might be great for those who want more fine-grain control, but they're overly complicated for those of us who thought the old Silent/Vibrate/VariableVolume worked without issue. Using an Android Wear device compounds this issue. Read below for the reasons.

<>"None" doesn't give us the option of allowing alarms to ring through. For those of us who used to choose "silent" before Lollipop, the only option we have now is to use the workaround of "Priority."

<>You can skirt around issue #1 by going into Priority mode and not allowing any exclusions for any callers/texts/events, which only allows alarms to go through, but this pretty much defeats the purpose of a Priority mode. You can't have both a "sleeping" mode and a real "Priority" mode when "None" excludes alarms.

<>Android Wear 5.0 now links the notifications mode of your watch to your phone. When your phone is silent, your watch won't vibrate, and its converse. Before AW 5.0, a Lollipopped phone would be on "Priority" with no exclusions to ensure it'd be on Silent, my watch would be set to allow notifications to vibrate. Now on AW 5.0, they're both linked and there's no way to keep the phone fully silent while allowing the watch to pass vibrating notifications (unless you enable "mute connected phone" in AW and set your ringtone to "None"). Having to resort to this last option is ridiculous since watch-free days would require you to dive into your ringtone settings or AW settings every time to right this oversight.

I hope for the rest of you will sign this petition to show Google that they've over-backwards-engineered this aspect of Android and Android Wear. While many of us fervent Android followers can find ways to work around these issues (sort of), can you imagine what the average joe will think when he's presented with this new notification system?