Android is no longer an ugly-duckling platform trying to catch up with iOS, but a beautiful platform that truly rivals iOS in all important ways -- and now surpasses it in terms of market share. However, mobile app developers have only recently begun to transition from "we need an app for Android too, quick!" to "we need great apps for both Android and iOS," so it will take a little while for all those ugly, hastily-put-together Android apps to become a thing of the past.
Is there a way to see how the fragmentation (most important for me: screen size) is at this moment? I've got a low end android phone (Galaxy Mini) which works well but I can't install a lot of stuff (Path comes to mind) because of screen resolution.
I think the mobile OS market is going to end looking somewhat similar to the PC OS market, but changing Windows for Android. The market share race is impossible for Apple to win with their current pricing and model range. It's normal to see a lot of activations if the cheapest phone is $50
What does this site have to do with android anyway? Isn't the article basically saying, its possible to develop good looking apps on android?
The problem with android is that it never had any design language like iPhone and the Windows Phone have. They give a framework for an app developer to work within. It inspires them to make consistent beautiful designs. Android has always been this free-form thing which I think caused many ugly apps to be developed for it.
Windows Phone market place for one is full of such beautiful apps, thanks to the detailed guidelines about the metro design.
The apps look great for sure and it seems like the big dogs are prioritizing Android. Many of these examples are in fact on both platforms, and overall they look better on iOS than the android version. On Android they look like a modified, less 'pretty' version of the iOS app- particularly the ones that carry over iOS design patterns.
I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc.
I would think that web designers, and designers in general, would be happy with the flexibility to create their own thing rather than having something that pretty much looks like everything else.
The web used to have some consistencies, like <A> tags rendering as blue with an underline and always loaded a new page, but that's long since gone. Nowadays designers are free to make links look and work how they want.
I, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. I prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same.
I'm a bit more surprised by the lack of comments about openness. You would think, that being a site for hackers, being able to install whatever you want on your mobile hand held computer would be a big deal. I mean, most people here would likely not even think of buying a laptop or a desktop that restricted them in the ways that iOS does. Consistency and looks are good and important, but to me, secondary to control.
iOS is an appliance, Android is a computing platform. I want my phone to be a computing platform.
It is true that designers and tinkerers are probably happy to interact (and 'play') with all of these different interfaces.
But people that don't care about computers the way most readers of this site do aren't happy to be surprised by every new application. Consistency means comfort; even for websites, many of those aimed at general consumption (think newspapers and magazines) aim for simplicity and consistency.
* I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc*
And every day hundreds of millions of people waste some of their time and intelligence making sense of said inconsistent designs.
This is why Safari's reader and Readability are so popular.
But.. the web is very consistent. Sure, from page to page you might see completely different button graphics, header images, and colors. That's not what is important though. Think about the layout. The spacing. The background boxes behind your text. Contrasting font sizes for header text vs content text. Ancillary links at the bottom or top. The deltas between colors an individual page is expected to use (and the variety in colors an individual page is not to use).
The consistency of the web is very important. That consistency is exactly what lets us look at a new web page and immediately start making sense of it and websites that don't conform to this consistency are the websites that we immediately label "terrible" and "unusable".
>I, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. I prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same.
I see a problem with that. It's that many(most?) apps have 1 or 2 developers with hardly any design experience, and no designers. So it's important for the default look and feel to be usable and stylish which iOS and Windows Phone do. This does not mean that they all look the same, because the developers with resources can do additional design work(perhaps by hiring a designer for the next version) on top of the default UI and UX to make the apps look more beautiful and with even better UX.
Having used a tablet with Gingerbread, both the OS and the apps were pretty much terrible(in some part because the OS many apps were designed for phones and not tablets). ICS improves the design in the OS quite a bit and some apps(like the ones featured in the article) have great design, but the vast majority of the rest of the ~500K apps in the Store don't look good still, because you can't expect free or 99c apps to hire expensive designers upfront or spend too much time on design because of a very real and common scenario that it won't make any revenue worth the design cost and time. Similar apps on iOS and WP may look the same as each other, but atleast the UX and the UI look decent if you stick to the defaults.
>I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc.
I see that as a bad thing and I get irritated every day especially on sites where I need information real fast, like the DMV, police, car insurance website, company careers page or address etc. Mystery meat navigation, especially on hover abounds on the web.
Especially when I am on a phone, quickly getting the info I need for websites and apps is much more important than some slow loading website with 800KB of slow Javascript and retina sized images wrapped in byzantine navigation.
Since ICS, Android is beautiful. Well, the OS core is, anyway. Widget makers and the like still don't seem to have got the design memo, but I suspect that's because design talents are so focused on iOS.
We just need the app makers to catch up. Foursquare, for instance, has been redesigned and looks great. However, their widgets haven't been touched and look awful by comparison. Spotify has done a far better job of updating everything at once.
It's not because design talents are focused on iOS, it's that design talents are focused on the Android users that are worth targeting. Namely, people on 2.1 or 2.2+.
Android generally monetizes/converts worse than iOS, so those who want a presence on Android can't afford to take advantage of any of the new stuff until old devices are retired sufficiently to make the tradeoff really worth it. It's been really tough to see all of the improvements, because Google is addressing user upgrades so poorly (even though the fault lies mostly with the manufacturers) that the upgrade problem is such a big deal for developers.
The problem with the Android UI isn't (only) the lack of beauty, it's the lack of consistency, style and attention to detail. Things like included/used fonts (although the default iOS notes app also fails horribly here), placement of back buttons. And that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the Android UI, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing. In iOS the 'back' button is always on the same location AND tells you where you're going back to. Android has a dedicated button, and it surprised me more than enough where it was taking me back to.
So yes, Android could use a better/cleaner visual style, but that's not it's biggest problem. Also, if a new visual style would be adopted, it should be universal. Right now it's a mess of apps trying to do their own thing because the default style is ugly, and these examples demonstrate that perfectly... Android 4 has shown some improvement but I still don't like it.
There are also quite a few iOS apps that don't necessarily respect the general look&feel of iOS, but some of them succeed in having a distinct style without clashing badly with the rest of the interface. Hell, Google showed that it is capable of doing just this, just look at the Google+ and the new YouTube app, they are pretty neat.
I think Android UI designers should use iPhones and Windows 7/8 phones as their daily device, or switch at least once every week. Then they'd see what's wrong, what irritates them about every OS and find a way around some of the moronic decisions were made in some of these OS's, and all are guilty of this to some extend. Android at this moment however gets the crown in usability WTF's.
Disclaimer: I own an iPhone and iPad, but mainly develop for Android/BB/WinMobile.
In iOS the 'back' button is always on the same location AND tells you where you're going back to.
Yes, that is true, but only for a screen with a back button, otherwise that spot on the screen is probably an "edit" or something else you don't want to do. And after you realize its not "back", you're off hunting around the rest of the screen for the "done" or "cancel" button. Unless of course, you came from a different screen on the same logical "level", where to go back to the screen you came from means picking from one of the row of tabs at the bottom of the screen. Unless you're in an app with a row of tabs at both the top and the bottom of the screen. In that case, the tabs at the top might belong to the page selected at the bottom, or the tabs at the bottom might belong to the page selected at the top, hopefully the UI has been designed with a visual afforance to give you a hint.
Disclaimer: I've been using an iPhone for about 2 months after 2 years of android ownership. They both have their own way of doing things that you can get used to one and think the other feels foreign. FWIW, After time and familiarity, you forget to look at it critically; iOS UI is clunky and unintuitive, its just that us iOS owners have been tossing eachother off about just how great iPhones are for years. And you can't pretend like this isn't true, now that I'm in the club, iDevice owners try to get me to join in some collective pursuance-rationalization quite frequently.
>And that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the Android UI, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing.
I think this is more of a personal preference thing than something that is broken. I use an android phone, and used to use a honeycomb tablet. When i replaced the tablet with an iPad, the thing i hated most about iOS was the back button behaviour. In iOS back takes you back to wherever the application developer thinks back should take you. In Android, except for very rare cases, back takes you back to the previous screen you were on, which might be up one level like on iOS, or it might be a different app entirely. One isn't better than the other, they're just different functions.
These seem really inconsistent to me. Feedly looks almost like a metro (sorry, "Windows 8-style") app. doubleTwist looks like an iOS app, as do Square Card Reader and Tumblr. Reddit Sync Pro seems to fit in with Google+, so I assume that's what modern Android apps are supposed to look like.
None of these general aesthetics are bad, but the inconsistency seems to be an issue. (Actually, a few of them do look bad to me, like Rdio, with the very dated "app home screen" that looks like it was copied from the old Facebook iOS app.)
Android doesn't have as much "drag and drop" as iOS. For example, you can't add a tab bar at the bottom, nav bar at the top, table view in the middle, set the text of each cell in the table view, and have an app that looks complete and looks like a stock Apple app. If you do that with Android you're just going to have a flat black screen with lines of text crammed next to each other with 0px of spacing. You really have to do _all_ your own design with Android. That tends to lead to more inconsistency, but more originality as well. Besides, when each app takes up all available real estate, do you really need consistency between apps? Distinctive styles are just a nice reminder of what app you're in.
It's funny you mention that. I just got through looking at ubermusic which is almost an exact clone of (or, if you prefer, heavily inspired by) the Zune software for Windows Phone.
I, for one, revel in diversity of looks, function, and interface. It keeps things fresh and interesting. Especially in an internet that seems to be more and more conformed to the same styles (all of googles products, twitter bootstrap, etc)
Of course Android can be beautiful if you showcase a few screen shots created by some very talented designers. After spending the last 4 years as an Android developer, its clear that the platform falls short in two places at the intersection of UX and UI. I've worked with some of the best designers and they always produced beautiful assets and screens, but we were always left making important UX decisions that caused inconsistency with other apps. The "beauty" that many users come to appreciate with iOS and Metro, is the cross app consistency, experience and cohesion with the operating system itself. Even apps produced by Google have a tremendously wide gap in consistency. The other major problem is development decisions made (and allowed by the platform) by software engineers. More than a few of the apps in this list do unthinkable things like processing data on the UI thread or having terrible offline experiences. This can turn a beautifully designed app into a terrible app very quickly.
It's important to distinguish "looks pretty" and "beautiful".
I agree that Android can look gorgeous, but that can only go so far. Android's problem is consistency. I've used every alternate android build I could find, and the custom (and default) themes and UI menu system lacked consistency. My favorite was MiUi and even that had terrible consistency issues.
iOS, on the other hand, is supremely superior in this department. The cohesiveness of the experience is second to none. I value that over custom configurations any day. My android phones have been wonderful hack-fests, but at the end of the day, the one thing I can't hack into them is a consistent experience.
Some of these are really nice. I'm curious how many of these are Android-specific though. Path looks pretty similar on iOS and so do FourSquare, Flipboard etc. Which of these are examples of good mobile design that holds itself on various platforms (iOS, Android etc.) and which are unique to Android?
is it bad if i find it inconsistent, annoying to use, etc?
I mean, it is pretty (well, arguably, most of them are), but, the buttons are all over the place and everyone seems to have it's own UI plastered on top of more or less "android ui compliant" stuff.
This is a complaint about Mobile in general, not Android. People bitch about fragmentation (and it is a bit painful), but in the regard of "everyone has their own UX on top of the system default" iOS is in exactly as bad a boat, if not worse. Some of the most popular iOS apps take their UX off in crazy directions (a common example: Tweetbot).
Look closely though. You'll notice the ActionBar is extremely prevalent in these. The ActionBar is actually one of those few Android teachable moments; I wish Apple did this as well, as consistently, or as themably. I've used a lot of these apps (and I am sad to not see Pattrn up there!) and it's very much the case that they have a fairly consistent set of "touch semantics" that screenshots don't reveal. E.g., Tap upper right corner to configure; long press for edit; swipe horizontally to navigate; long press on text fields to engage c/p editor bar.
For better or worse, Android's toolkits offer a lot more guidance to the programmer on "the right way" than Apple's do (a great example of this that bleeds into UI is how Android has a ton of Loader patterns and iOS doesn't have anything nearly so sophisticated in its core lib). So in some respects, Android is actually slightly better off; the bigger toolkit means you get some superior consistency. The recent iterations (and backported support) framework strongly encourages you to do things like support long presses and swipe navigation and backpane navigation.
I think nobody would have a problem using any of these apps. Most of them even implement some kind of action bar so you totally know where to look for your user controls.
the inconsistencies are usually defined by the developers. As you can see most these apps are available to the ios store as well. So its really not fair to judge the platform vs the developers.
I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Android couldn't be beautiful but rather great design comes secondary to iOS. As far as innovative products go, I'd argue that this is still very much the case.
Flipboard set a standard for beautiful news applications. Path reimagined what social could be on mobile and made numerous UI innovations. Instagram took a novel concept and made photosharing exciting to a new audience. Square showed off the increasing real business viability by making payments accessible to anyone with a phone. All these apps weren't available on Android for some time. Sure they are now but this far more a matter of increasing market share than a change of opinions and it continues to hold true as we see well-designed apps like Paper start iOS only. Android is by no means the epicenter of creativity on mobile and though beautiful, the ports largely still have substandard experiences than their iOS counterparts.
In my opinion this is a result of equal parts hardware and audience. Android may be on more devices as a whole but many of the devices are not even remotely competitive with top-tier smartphones. They are sold with the intention of being budget friendly and thus it becomes a hassle to acquire the additional devices, adapt interfaces to the numerous screen sizes on them, and adjust for performance limitations. I also believe that the design of the iPhone naturally attracts great designers. Android has a reputation of throwing good hardware into poorly designed phones with cheap materials and inferior build quality - the future is just not as cool when you need to interact with plastic buttons. Lastly, I believe the iPhone audience is naturally more in tune to seek out great designed products. The openness that appeals to Android customers creates an expectation that applications should be free. There is a decreased interest in browsing the marketplace and many of the most popular apps are just free copycats of popular iPhone applications.
Very happy to see the Bump 3.0 on there (I worked on it). ICS and all of it's native apps were a great statement by Google to show how they'd like their apps to look and feel. We followed their queue and used the action bar and view pager to great success. Also having a great visual designer doesn't hurt either.
For anyone looking for a fully-featured notes app, Catch, mentioned in TFA, is the way to go. It does sync, has a web interface, and probably a 100 other features I haven't used.
I'm surprised to see so many comments claiming these apps look like Metro. Frankly the level of design on WP is much lower - third-party apps are extremely low quality and all of MS's apps are much simpler and lack the richer textures and details of these apps. Judged on these screenshots, Android looks much nicer than WP, and seems to strike the right balance between clarity and detail.
[+] [-] cs702|13 years ago|reply
UPDATE: koko775 raises a good point: the large installed base of pre-ICS Android versions may also be a factor. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533819
[+] [-] Adirael|13 years ago|reply
I think the mobile OS market is going to end looking somewhat similar to the PC OS market, but changing Windows for Android. The market share race is impossible for Apple to win with their current pricing and model range. It's normal to see a lot of activations if the cheapest phone is $50
[+] [-] Mythbusters|13 years ago|reply
The problem with android is that it never had any design language like iPhone and the Windows Phone have. They give a framework for an app developer to work within. It inspires them to make consistent beautiful designs. Android has always been this free-form thing which I think caused many ugly apps to be developed for it.
Windows Phone market place for one is full of such beautiful apps, thanks to the detailed guidelines about the metro design.
[+] [-] eyevariety|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bonch|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Osiris|13 years ago|reply
I would think that web designers, and designers in general, would be happy with the flexibility to create their own thing rather than having something that pretty much looks like everything else.
The web used to have some consistencies, like <A> tags rendering as blue with an underline and always loaded a new page, but that's long since gone. Nowadays designers are free to make links look and work how they want.
I, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. I prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same.
[+] [-] tensor|13 years ago|reply
iOS is an appliance, Android is a computing platform. I want my phone to be a computing platform.
[+] [-] xorbyte|13 years ago|reply
But people that don't care about computers the way most readers of this site do aren't happy to be surprised by every new application. Consistency means comfort; even for websites, many of those aimed at general consumption (think newspapers and magazines) aim for simplicity and consistency.
[+] [-] richcollins|13 years ago|reply
And every day hundreds of millions of people waste some of their time and intelligence making sense of said inconsistent designs.
This is why Safari's reader and Readability are so popular.
[+] [-] awolf|13 years ago|reply
The consistency of the web is very important. That consistency is exactly what lets us look at a new web page and immediately start making sense of it and websites that don't conform to this consistency are the websites that we immediately label "terrible" and "unusable".
[+] [-] cooldeal|13 years ago|reply
I see a problem with that. It's that many(most?) apps have 1 or 2 developers with hardly any design experience, and no designers. So it's important for the default look and feel to be usable and stylish which iOS and Windows Phone do. This does not mean that they all look the same, because the developers with resources can do additional design work(perhaps by hiring a designer for the next version) on top of the default UI and UX to make the apps look more beautiful and with even better UX.
Having used a tablet with Gingerbread, both the OS and the apps were pretty much terrible(in some part because the OS many apps were designed for phones and not tablets). ICS improves the design in the OS quite a bit and some apps(like the ones featured in the article) have great design, but the vast majority of the rest of the ~500K apps in the Store don't look good still, because you can't expect free or 99c apps to hire expensive designers upfront or spend too much time on design because of a very real and common scenario that it won't make any revenue worth the design cost and time. Similar apps on iOS and WP may look the same as each other, but atleast the UX and the UI look decent if you stick to the defaults.
[+] [-] recoiledsnake|13 years ago|reply
I see that as a bad thing and I get irritated every day especially on sites where I need information real fast, like the DMV, police, car insurance website, company careers page or address etc. Mystery meat navigation, especially on hover abounds on the web.
Especially when I am on a phone, quickly getting the info I need for websites and apps is much more important than some slow loading website with 800KB of slow Javascript and retina sized images wrapped in byzantine navigation.
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation01.html
[+] [-] untog|13 years ago|reply
We just need the app makers to catch up. Foursquare, for instance, has been redesigned and looks great. However, their widgets haven't been touched and look awful by comparison. Spotify has done a far better job of updating everything at once.
[+] [-] koko775|13 years ago|reply
Android generally monetizes/converts worse than iOS, so those who want a presence on Android can't afford to take advantage of any of the new stuff until old devices are retired sufficiently to make the tradeoff really worth it. It's been really tough to see all of the improvements, because Google is addressing user upgrades so poorly (even though the fault lies mostly with the manufacturers) that the upgrade problem is such a big deal for developers.
[+] [-] koffiezet|13 years ago|reply
So yes, Android could use a better/cleaner visual style, but that's not it's biggest problem. Also, if a new visual style would be adopted, it should be universal. Right now it's a mess of apps trying to do their own thing because the default style is ugly, and these examples demonstrate that perfectly... Android 4 has shown some improvement but I still don't like it.
There are also quite a few iOS apps that don't necessarily respect the general look&feel of iOS, but some of them succeed in having a distinct style without clashing badly with the rest of the interface. Hell, Google showed that it is capable of doing just this, just look at the Google+ and the new YouTube app, they are pretty neat.
I think Android UI designers should use iPhones and Windows 7/8 phones as their daily device, or switch at least once every week. Then they'd see what's wrong, what irritates them about every OS and find a way around some of the moronic decisions were made in some of these OS's, and all are guilty of this to some extend. Android at this moment however gets the crown in usability WTF's.
Disclaimer: I own an iPhone and iPad, but mainly develop for Android/BB/WinMobile.
[+] [-] cbs|13 years ago|reply
Yes, that is true, but only for a screen with a back button, otherwise that spot on the screen is probably an "edit" or something else you don't want to do. And after you realize its not "back", you're off hunting around the rest of the screen for the "done" or "cancel" button. Unless of course, you came from a different screen on the same logical "level", where to go back to the screen you came from means picking from one of the row of tabs at the bottom of the screen. Unless you're in an app with a row of tabs at both the top and the bottom of the screen. In that case, the tabs at the top might belong to the page selected at the bottom, or the tabs at the bottom might belong to the page selected at the top, hopefully the UI has been designed with a visual afforance to give you a hint.
Disclaimer: I've been using an iPhone for about 2 months after 2 years of android ownership. They both have their own way of doing things that you can get used to one and think the other feels foreign. FWIW, After time and familiarity, you forget to look at it critically; iOS UI is clunky and unintuitive, its just that us iOS owners have been tossing eachother off about just how great iPhones are for years. And you can't pretend like this isn't true, now that I'm in the club, iDevice owners try to get me to join in some collective pursuance-rationalization quite frequently.
[+] [-] notatoad|13 years ago|reply
I think this is more of a personal preference thing than something that is broken. I use an android phone, and used to use a honeycomb tablet. When i replaced the tablet with an iPad, the thing i hated most about iOS was the back button behaviour. In iOS back takes you back to wherever the application developer thinks back should take you. In Android, except for very rare cases, back takes you back to the previous screen you were on, which might be up one level like on iOS, or it might be a different app entirely. One isn't better than the other, they're just different functions.
[+] [-] dpark|13 years ago|reply
None of these general aesthetics are bad, but the inconsistency seems to be an issue. (Actually, a few of them do look bad to me, like Rdio, with the very dated "app home screen" that looks like it was copied from the old Facebook iOS app.)
[+] [-] pkulak|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robert_nsu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeblau|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lallouz|13 years ago|reply
It's important to distinguish "looks pretty" and "beautiful".
[+] [-] seunghomattyang|13 years ago|reply
>> As it stands, If you design a great app for Android and people say 'hey, that looks like an Android app', that means you've failed.[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/sdw/status/187245772205600769
[+] [-] rradu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verganileonardo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bstar77|13 years ago|reply
iOS, on the other hand, is supremely superior in this department. The cohesiveness of the experience is second to none. I value that over custom configurations any day. My android phones have been wonderful hack-fests, but at the end of the day, the one thing I can't hack into them is a consistent experience.
[+] [-] darkstalker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] micheljansen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zobzu|13 years ago|reply
I mean, it is pretty (well, arguably, most of them are), but, the buttons are all over the place and everyone seems to have it's own UI plastered on top of more or less "android ui compliant" stuff.
[+] [-] KirinDave|13 years ago|reply
Look closely though. You'll notice the ActionBar is extremely prevalent in these. The ActionBar is actually one of those few Android teachable moments; I wish Apple did this as well, as consistently, or as themably. I've used a lot of these apps (and I am sad to not see Pattrn up there!) and it's very much the case that they have a fairly consistent set of "touch semantics" that screenshots don't reveal. E.g., Tap upper right corner to configure; long press for edit; swipe horizontally to navigate; long press on text fields to engage c/p editor bar.
For better or worse, Android's toolkits offer a lot more guidance to the programmer on "the right way" than Apple's do (a great example of this that bleeds into UI is how Android has a ton of Loader patterns and iOS doesn't have anything nearly so sophisticated in its core lib). So in some respects, Android is actually slightly better off; the bigger toolkit means you get some superior consistency. The recent iterations (and backported support) framework strongly encourages you to do things like support long presses and swipe navigation and backpane navigation.
[+] [-] mephju|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angryasian|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angry-hacker|13 years ago|reply
I'm surprised that so apps look WP metro style
[+] [-] brandoncapecci|13 years ago|reply
Flipboard set a standard for beautiful news applications. Path reimagined what social could be on mobile and made numerous UI innovations. Instagram took a novel concept and made photosharing exciting to a new audience. Square showed off the increasing real business viability by making payments accessible to anyone with a phone. All these apps weren't available on Android for some time. Sure they are now but this far more a matter of increasing market share than a change of opinions and it continues to hold true as we see well-designed apps like Paper start iOS only. Android is by no means the epicenter of creativity on mobile and though beautiful, the ports largely still have substandard experiences than their iOS counterparts.
In my opinion this is a result of equal parts hardware and audience. Android may be on more devices as a whole but many of the devices are not even remotely competitive with top-tier smartphones. They are sold with the intention of being budget friendly and thus it becomes a hassle to acquire the additional devices, adapt interfaces to the numerous screen sizes on them, and adjust for performance limitations. I also believe that the design of the iPhone naturally attracts great designers. Android has a reputation of throwing good hardware into poorly designed phones with cheap materials and inferior build quality - the future is just not as cool when you need to interact with plastic buttons. Lastly, I believe the iPhone audience is naturally more in tune to seek out great designed products. The openness that appeals to Android customers creates an expectation that applications should be free. There is a decreased interest in browsing the marketplace and many of the most popular apps are just free copycats of popular iPhone applications.
[+] [-] ikhare|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbreunig|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w1ntermute|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aschobel|13 years ago|reply
If anybody has any questions feel free to email me at [email protected]
[+] [-] corporalagumbo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomp|13 years ago|reply