
Android can be beautiful - mephju
http://androidniceties.tumblr.com/
======
cs702
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.

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
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

~~~
mtgx
I wish Google would force manufacturers to stop using the 320x240 resolution.
The browsing experience is very poor on such a resolution, unless you're using
Opera Mini perhaps, and I imagine it's hard for developers to refit their apps
for such a small resolution, too, as even menu text will take a lot of space
on that resolution.

I also wish they mandated everyone has at least 512 MB of RAM in their phones,
and at least 2 GB for the OS and 2 GB of app space. That way upgrades can be
ensured for years, and people, especially regular people, can actually install
more than 5 apps without running out of space (and no, App2SD doesn't count,
and it's almost useless). And while they are at it, they should also stop
supporting the ARMv6 architecture, now that the ARMv7 Cortex A5 and next year
Cortex A7 are going to be used.

If Google wants to bring down the hammer on manufacturers, it should be for
stuff like this, that ensures users of Android devices, even at the very low-
end, get a pretty good experience, otherwise they'll always think Android
devices are crap, after their first cheap Android smartphone. They don't want
that kind of perception to affect the Android brand in the long term.

~~~
jrockway
I kind of doubt that users of low-end phones know what Android is or know what
they're missing. It's not like they're downgrading from an iPhone, they're
probably upgrading from a feature phone. And even the worst Android phone is
much nicer than that.

Eventually they will upgrade to a nice Android phone, and will enjoy the
enhanced user experience. But cost _does_ matter to some people, and although
browsing at 320x240 is hardly ideal, it's probably better than not being able
to buy food for a week.

(I personally use very few apps aside from the default Google apps. I mostly
want to receive text messages, make phone calls, and browse the web. Apps, to
me, don't add much value when the app-maker already has a perfectly fine
website.)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I'm a hacker news user, and I have a cheap phone with a 320x240 single-touch
screen and keyboard. I don't see what's so bad about browsing the web on it, I
can certainly access HN fine enough.

~~~
kristofferR
The same could be said about browsing the web with IE6, that doesn't mean that
the latest Chrome/Firefox won't provide a much better and smoother experience.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Really? I'm not convinced. Double-tap to change column width works pretty
well.

------
Osiris
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.

~~~
tensor
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.

~~~
bct
The secret to understanding HN is that it's not _actually_ a site for hackers.
The word "Hacker" in the title bar is written on a board that was nailed up
over the word "Startup".

~~~
ajross
It's a digression, but there's more truth to this than the snark would
indicate. Five years ago, this was a site for hackers building companies, and
the emphasis was clearly on the "building" part. It rapidly took over from
similar spots (/r/programming, slashdot) as _the_ center of consciousness for
web-focused developer discussion. Now, it's entirely preoccupied with the
"companies" part -- what platforms to target, how to manage funding, etc...
Many of the hackers seem to have gone silent.

Or else they've migrated somewhere else, and I haven't been able to find
them...

~~~
ionforce
I would love to find a community for programming-related issues void of all
the startup nonsense.

Any ideas?

~~~
cdawzrd
What's wrong with /r/programming?

~~~
cgag
Worse community. I just want /hn/programming.

------
untog
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.

~~~
koko775
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.

~~~
untog
Not true, actually. Google has released a compatibility library to allow
developers to target old versions:

[http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-
library.ht...](http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.html)

So older Android versions can use modern apps. Both the examples I gave
(Foursquare, Spotify) work with both newer and older versions.

~~~
georgemcbay
There are some pretty gaping holes in the compatibility library. Luckily the
most important of these (ActionBar support) is covered by a great 3rd party
library (ActionBarSherlock).

If anything, I think the existence of the compatibility library and ABS show
that Google is dropping the ball a bit on the core Android framework. Why even
have these be extra (and in one case 3rd party) libraries? Where possible why
not just write the core SDK in a way such that it can fall back to 1.6 or 2.2
without having to worry about fiddling with compatibility libraries?

~~~
bad_user
But Android was designed to allow fallback to older versions. Can you think of
a case where you cannot? If anything the compatibility libraries stand as
proof.

~~~
georgemcbay
My point was the fallback should be more seamless (and shouldn't rely on 3rd
party FOSS libraries, which it sometimes does).

Example 1: Fragments.

Introduced with Honeycomb. Android supports these via the "support" library
back to 1.6, but the APIs you're using are slightly different (eg.
getFragmentManager() vs getSupportFragmentManager()) and the classes you use
live in different packages (eg. android.app.Fragment vs
android.support.v4.app.Fragment). If the support library were more tightly
integrated with the mainline SDK, you wouldn't have to worry about all these
splits, but it isn't so you do. You have to decide up front if you want to
code to the mainline SDK classes or the support versions and then this gets
worse when you implement other classes which use Fragments in a library meant
for other developers -- should your classes assume those developer's Fragments
derive from android.support.v4.app.Fragment or android.app.Fragment? It gets
really messy really fast.

Example 2: ActionBar

Not even supported via the regular support library, you have to go get
ActionBarSherlock which itself extends the Android support library. Kudos to
Jake Wharton on this great library, but why didn't Google just make their
ActionBar backward compatible to earlier versions out of the gate? It is
clearly possible to do this as ABS does it.

I'm sure there is some specific reason the Android devs could give for why the
support lib and the main SDK are so increasingly fragmented and it may have a
very good legacy reason for existing, but having them work this way is harmful
in the long run, IMO. Maintaining this split makes things much harder for devs
just trying to get into Android who are very confused by all the different
decisions they have to make just to get basic app functionality working across
a decent cross-section of Android devices.

Granted, I'm not saying any of this makes Android development impossible or
akin to rocket science, but it does make it needlessly complex which is bad
given that Android is already seen as a bit of a red-headed-stepchild to iOS
development even despite the overall marketshare advantage Android has.

~~~
cageface
Google does have a backwards-compatible implementation of the action bar
planned but they haven't given a release date. I agree that it shouldn't fall
on the Foss community to fill this gap.

------
koffiezet
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.

~~~
cbs
_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.

------
dpark
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.)

~~~
pkulak
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.

~~~
niho
It's not (only) about the consistency of visual style. It's about the the
consistency of interaction.

~~~
KirinDave
But this is not a problem Android has when apps target 4.0. The ActionBar has
been a huge stabilizing influence on the Android interaction pattern; strongly
enforcing backpaning, swipe-to-navigate, and consistent locations for
navigation.

I'm not sure why you'd say this. Android actually hasn't suffered from tactile
UI fragmentation much more than iOS has.

~~~
dpark
> _Android actually hasn't suffered from tactile UI fragmentation much more
> than iOS has._

If the apps on this page a representative, I'd say that Android has
experienced a lot more UI fragmentation than iOS. These are being held up as
examples of best Android interfaces, and they look very inconsistent to me.

In contrast, I just opened up a bunch of random apps on my phone's home
screen, and they all look very much like "iOS style". Obviously the native
apps match well, but so does OneBusAway, Wikipanion, Skype (though the UI is
flatter than the rest), Google Voice, Amazon, OneNote, etc.

These all look like iOS apps to me.

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onebusaway/id329380089>

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipanion/id288349436>

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skype/id304878510>

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-voice/id318698524>

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/amazon-mobile/id297606951>

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-onenote/id410395246>

~~~
KirinDave
I thought you were talking about the actual meaning of taps and swipes and
whatnot... that's what I was referring to the as "tactile" part of it, where
things like long presses and swipes mean the same thing between apps. In terms
of visual style, there has been significant change over the last 18 months as
designers come to grips with the new 4.0 style. Both iOS and Android tend to
suffer from the problem of "What the fuck can I press?" with some apps.

But to my eyes as an Android user, I see a lot of consistency here. The
ActionBar is firmly in place, so I know where to go for navigation. The visual
metaphors vary in terms of actual look, but I get what's up.

For example, compare to very different apps: Catch and doubleTwist Alarm
Clock. Both are "bounded" by their top bar (although Catch has elected to add
extra app-specific chrome at the bottom, too). The navigation "upwards our
out" between panes is consistently in the upper left. The additional actions
for the app as a whole are on the top right.

In cases where the apps deviate (e.g., bottom bars in Gmail and Catch), the
designers have had the good sense to use the standardized icons as opposed to
further customization, helping to signal the user that this app does deviate
from pure actoinbar navigation. The share, attach, favorite, and trash icons
are all with pixels of standard.

A lot of iOS users first coming to Android (including myself) after the advent
of ICS may be surprised once they realize how consistent the presence of the
ActionBar is, even if it varies in appearance. I encourage you to play with
one to see this in action. I certainly felt that sense of confusion at first
because I'm used to unified navigation chrome from iOS for most things outside
of games. I think this is just a case of longtime iOS users not being familiar
with the visual language of the Android platform.

~~~
dpark
Well, the meaning of taps and swipes is part of the consistency issue.
Interaction is more than just "what does swipe do?". It's also "how do I go
back?", "how do I take an action on this item?", "how do I change context?".

I personally don't run into a ton of issues in iOS with determining what
swipes vs long-presses vs long-taps do. Swipes in a list tend to invoke the
"delete" context. Swipes up/down scroll. Tap to invoke. Long-tap for select in
a text context. There's certainly not 100% consistency, but it seems fairly
consistent to me with the apps I use. I can't speak to how consistent or
inconsistent these are on Android, because I haven't used an Android device
enough to really know.

Speaking to Catch and doubleTwist, these seem inconsistent to me. Visually,
they're quite different, but there seem to be pretty significant functional
differences. Many of the doubleTwist screens do _not_ have the "up/out"
chevron in the upper left (how is this not redundant with the global "back",
anyway?). On the 4th screenshot in particular, there's no "up/out", but there
is a settings cog that appears in none of the other screenshots. It appears
that doubleTwist also uses a "slide to reveal" metaphor (invoked by the
chevron on the main screen) that isn't in Catch or the other apps. In catch,
despite there being an action bar at the top, virtually all of the actions you
might want to take actually seem to be in the custom bar at the bottom. I
don't see how these at all demonstrate consistency.

~~~
KirinDave
> I personally don't run into a ton of issues in iOS with determining what
> swipes vs long-presses vs long-taps do.

Unless you play games or use some of the most popular twitter clients. ;)

> Visually, they're quite different, but there seem to be pretty significant
> functional differences.

To be expected, they do very different things. I chose them because of their
differences. Both apps have deviated from a very mellow Holo standard without
introducing a lot of confusion. Evaluate their differences as deltas from the
Android baseline (the way a user would), instead of as deltas from each other
(which is how someone looking at screenshots on a webpage would).

> (how is this not redundant with the global "back", anyway?)

Oh, because back goes to the last thing you were doing. The chevron goes up in
the app. Any Android user figures this out and why it is this way very
quickly, but I can see why an iOS user probably finds the distinction weird.

Apps share functionality in Android. So unless the app has hijacked your back
button (very rare, only games, browsers and the keyboard tend to do this now),
it generally goes where you expect. It took a LONG time for the Android devs
to get this right, but for the most part it works surprisingly well now.

> On the 4th screenshot in particular, there's no "up/out", but there is a
> settings cog that appears in none of the other screenshots.

This is DoubleTwist being cute, for them they have their chevron animate down
with a backpane. The navigation has traveled to the lower left. This is
confusing in screenshots, but not in practice since it is essentially a snazzy
modal dialogue and the user has just spent 160ms or so watching the pane slide
down. It's essentially a backpane dialogue.

> In catch, despite there being an action bar at the top, virtually all of the
> actions you might want to take actually seem to be in the custom bar at the
> bottom. I don't see how these at all demonstrate consistency.

The ActionBar generally speaks to navigation aspects of the app, not specific
screen actions. In this, it's very much like iOS's topbars and clearly there
was some inspiration there. It's not unusual in an iOS app to see a novel
piece of chrome with fixed position for "add" and "remove" and other actions
core to the app.

~~~
dpark
> _Unless you play games or use some of the most popular twitter clients._

I haven't noticed any weird issues in games, but it's true that I don't play
much, nor do I use twitter with any frequency.

> _To be expected, they do very different things._

I agree there should be differences. My point is that with these two apps I
see almost no actual similarities in the UI. If you'd told me that one of
these was an Android app and the other was from, say, Meego, I'd totally have
believed it.

> _Evaluate their differences as deltas from the Android baseline (the way a
> user would), instead of as deltas from each other (which is how someone
> looking at screenshots on a webpage would)._

Ok, but the question was whether there was more fragmentation in Android than
iOS, and from what I can see the answer still appears to be yes. The deviation
from the "baseline" seems higher in Android.

> _Oh, because back goes to the last thing you were doing. The chevron goes up
> in the app. Any Android user figures this out and why it is this way very
> quickly, but I can see why an iOS user probably finds the distinction
> weird._

Maybe I'd understand this more if I used an Android device for an extended
period of time. It seems that these have a ton of overlap, though. Most of the
time, in my experience, up/out is the same as back, because I got to my
current location by drilling down through the content. Unless back is only
between apps now.

> _This is DoubleTwist being cute_

I get what they're doing. My point is that it's inconsistent with the
platform.

> _The ActionBar generally speaks to navigation aspects of the app, not
> specific screen actions._

Someone should tell the Google+ team. On their ActionBar, I see "write" (new
post?), "refresh", "reply", and "upload picture" (I'm guessing).

------
lallouz
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".

------
seunghomattyang
Reminds me of what Chief Creative Officer at doubleTwist said about designing
for Android:

>> 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
I don't think that's true. Some of these apps use elements from the Holo UI
themes that are distinctly Android, and still look beautiful.

------
bstar77
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.

~~~
chrisrhoden
Have you installed any apps on your iOS device? Consistency is pretty hard to
come by these days.

~~~
bstar77
I find the iOS UI patterns to be consistent, but the "skins" on those UI
elements tend to vary quite a bit. Now this is the case on the iPad, since I
don't have an iPhone I cannot speak to that. Just getting a podcast program on
android that had a consistent UI where things made sense was a fruitless
effort. Streaming content is not consistent either, some apps stream really
well (audio galaxy), while other stream terribly. These are the types of
things that I found maddening.

~~~
chrisrhoden
The ActionBar is very consistent on these apps - of the first several dozen I
only saw 2 that were not using an ActionBar.

Streaming has nothing to do with UI consistency. It's a battle, because the
APIs are very high level and you're limited in the amount of control you have
without a ton of work, and it seems like manufacturers are screwing with the
stack somewhere. Doesn't matter, though, because we're talking about UI
consistency.

The podcatcher app is sort of ripe for some good competition in this space,
with Google Listen no longer available. I am working on something.
<http://imgur.com/RtG8e> , but someone else should get in here too.

------
darkstalker
It's already known that since ICS Android is prettier and more functional than
iOS.

~~~
mrich
This. I cannot help but think "old-fashioned" when seeing an iOS UI. It is
smooth and functional, but it looks a bit from the seventies.

~~~
manmal
I have never seen a UI from the seventies, but I imagine them being more
DOS-y. Yes, the design has not received any major upgrades for 5 years now,
but this also makes users "feel at home". I once switched from my iPhone 1 to
an HTC Desire because I wanted a fresh look - but boy did I wish my iPhone
back after some weeks.

I'm now both an iOS & Android dev and designer (and owning quite some devices
from both sides), but I'll choose an iPhone anytime over iOS. There is no
Android experience. There is only a Galaxy Nexus experience, an S3
experience,... But there IS an iPhone experience, and I know that my phone
won't restart on me when I want to show my ticket to the train conductor.

------
micheljansen
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?

~~~
aschobel
Co-founder of Catch here, some context; we launched our first Android app in
2008 and have about 10x as many users on there as we do on iOS.

The issue we've seen is that people build an iOS app and then port it over to
Android.

We designed Catch 5.0 apps for Android and iPhone in parallel. This let us
keep consistency between the platforms when it made sense, but also let us
tweak the design early on so it could take advantage things unique to the
platform, e.g. Action Bar on Android.

The team is incredibly proud of this release, and it is nice to see folks
taking notice. Both Google and Apple have also featured this release,
everybody is beaming here. =)

------
zobzu
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.

~~~
KirinDave
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.

~~~
rimantas
Maybe you know something about Android, but I doubt you know as much about
iOS.

~~~
KirinDave
I have written iOS apps (although never public published) and taken classes in
iOS development. I am much more of a novice at Android development, but have
written a complete (albeit simple, un-networked appliance) app. I've focused
more on Android recently because that platform is evolving quickly.

So let's just pretent this isn't a shitty genetic fallacy post and address
your challenge head on, "Back up your example and prove to me Android's APIs
give more guidance than Android's in how to do ______." I specifically
mentioned the Loader pattern.

Compare: Google's Loader pattern:
[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Loade...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Loader.html)

A concrete and common example, doing an async task:
[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Async...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/AsyncTaskLoader.html)

Compare this to the equivalent API for doing async task usage in iOS:
[http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Perfor...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Performance/Reference/GCD_libdispatch_Ref/Reference/reference.html)

In iOS There is no concept of a "Loader", so the community has come up with
stuff like AsyncUIImageView and friends (code here:
<https://github.com/nicklockwood/AsyncImageView>) which still doesn't entirely
solve the problem, because solving the problem takes a lot of framework
support.

Sadly, fragmentation is at play again in this; and many Android developers
don't use Loaders because they're intimidated or confused or can't use them
for their entire panoply of supported devices; so there are a fair share of
Android apps that do not use them. You can usually catch this if you change
orientation and see things reload from scratch.

Given the rapidly increasing velocity of deployment of 4.0 devices, I think
this issue with framework fragmentation is transient.

------
angry-hacker
I like the screenshots but I don't understand the navigation of the page and
why would you hijack the default scrollbar of your browser?

I'm surprised that so apps look WP metro style

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
By "hijack the default scrollbar", you mean "apply standard webkit scrollbar
CSS properties"?

~~~
recursive
The page is going off the right edge of my browser, and I can find no way to
scroll see it. Call it what you want.

~~~
jentulman
There's a horizontal scrollbar per photoset just below the photo's.

I'm guessing this was designed by someone with a multitouch trackpad. I know I
tend to forget not everyone else has 2 finger scroll at their fingertips, I've
had to get into a habit of having a test run using a mouse when I put together
pages.

~~~
recursive
I see them now. I missed them because they don't look like scroll bars. I
don't even know what 2 finger scroll is. I usually scroll with my mouse wheel.
To scroll horizontally, I click the middle mouse button. These scroll bars
seem not to support that.

~~~
jentulman
I only found them after I went looking because of your comment. Seems weird
not just to have the single horizontal scroll at the bottom, it's too fiddly.

Those of us using multitouch trackpads can scroll by just swiping on the page
using N fingers, like scrolling on a touch phone by dragging the page with
your finger.

------
brandoncapecci
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.

------
ikhare
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.

------
dbreunig
It's comical/ironic how difficult that site is too browse.

~~~
Yhippa
Scrolling down is too difficult?

~~~
qxcv
No, but scrolling across is difficult. And they hijack all the scrollbars so
that they can show you a light grey box instead of the slightly lighter grey
box which your browser normally shows. If they just displayed everything
vertically and didn't mess with the scrollbars it would be an infinitely
better site.

Oh, and their theme locks up Firefox, however I'm willing to blame that on FF
rather than the designer(s).

------
w1ntermute
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.

~~~
aschobel
Thank you for the kind comment!

If anybody has any questions feel free to email me at a@catch.com

------
corporalagumbo
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.

------
ChrisArchitect
another similar Android app design blog <http://www.holoeverywhere.com/>

~~~
natep
Was going to post this, since it goes into more detail about each app, and
limits itself to apps that follow the Holo guidelines, rather than just
'beautiful' ones (for those that want a more 'consistent' experience). I'm now
subscribed to both.

------
barbs
Android can also be really ugly <http://fuglyandroid.tumblr.com/> :P

------
tomp
Reading this list, I just realized how useless all these apps feel. With the
exception of Google Maps, when you really need it.

------
tvon
There are some very nice looking apps in there.

Kind of meta but IMO the screenshots on that site are too big and should be
scaled down a bit.

~~~
bmunro
There is a size selector on the left. S M L XL

The XL is the actual size (pixel-wise) that you would see on a phone such as
the Galaxy Nexus.

------
jtreminio
Some more themes are on Reddit:

<http://www.reddit.com/r/androidthemes/>

~~~
tvon
These (in TFA) are app screenshots, not themes.

------
Dove
Humbling. I though I was doing really well making Android apps, but these
examples remind me how far there is to go.

------
anuraj
With ICS, android introduced a new design language and look and feel and
usability have improved. But nevertheless, we have always found the default UI
recommendations need to be overridden at least 10-20% of times to get a usable
app. And yes, ICS still looks like a cross of iOS and Windows Phone 7.

------
enraged_camel
It's good to see that Android is improving in this area. And I say that as an
Apple "fanboi". That said, it is unfortunate that the ecosystem still suffers
from heavy fragmentation, so only a small portion of users will be seeing the
benefits mentioned in the article.

------
wahsd
Slightly off topic, but anyone else notice that that site/page seems to
somehow choke on something. It spun up my CPU over something, I think resizing
the images or something. Don't have the time to look or care.

------
northisup
This is a list of apps that in no way use the android default widgets. So yes,
it can be beautiful when you do all the hard work yourself.

(and yes, these apps look fantastic)

~~~
fpgeek
That's just not true.

As others have noted, plenty of these apps are using the ActionBar (which is a
default widget starting with 3.0, with an unofficial, open-source
compatibility library) and plenty are using Fragments (also standard starting
with 3.0, with an official compatibility library).

Moreover, many of these apps (e.g. Boid, Pocket, Papermill) are explicitly
Holo-themed, so, at a minimum, they're using the default widgets for design
guidance even when they're not using them directly (for compatibility or other
reasons).

------
alpotryvayev
It steadily becomes more user-friendly, but there will always be a lot of
problems with different devices, and mostly with their screen size

------
marban
...but only if you skip regular UI conventions

------
jemeshsu
Are there other similar sites that showcase mobile app design? Best is one
that covers Android, iOS and Metro apps.

------
creativityhurts
It can be beautiful on the large-screen top models like Nexus S, S2, S3 and so
on that are owned by geeks, not on the LG Optimus-ish and other low-quality
phones that regular people buy. On my Samsung Galaxy S Mini not so much, for
example I couldn't install Path because the screen is too small.

~~~
estel
I'm not sure it's safe to say that the S2 and S3 are mainly owned by geeks.
Samsung have done a good job at targeting a similar demographic to the iPhone
with those devices.

~~~
creativityhurts
They're among the most expensive Android devices and that's why I assumed they
mostly owned by passionate users. My geek friends who are not on the Apple
side of things have Nexus and S2/3 and the rest of the people I know who just
wanted a not so expensive smartphone settled with Desire or Magic and so on.

------
miralize
I just dont see. Beatuiful is extremely subjective, so the title of this is
inherently incorrect. And beautiful they may be, but they are not usable,
consistent, or friendly. And the ones that are close to being good, have
niggling issues like spacing between items, which drives me nuts

------
spydum
The great irony is that page runs terrible on my galaxy2 tablet..

------
se85
Beautiful != Consistency

------
squarecat
Beautiful != usable

~~~
dictum
Two attributes that are not mutually exclusive.

------
jamesjguthrie
I really like the Google+ app, it's lovely.

------
BaconJuice
Great site, thank you.

------
drivebyacct2
Oh for the love of God, we still need convincing of this? Anyone with an
ICS/JB phone knows that Android is perfectly capable of looking good. My
"least-good" looking application that I use on a regular basis is the
Flashlight app, and even then, it's just a big round glossy button.

------
recoiledsnake
Looks somewhat inspired by Metro... not that that's a bad thing. ICS made a
huge stride in the Android UI, and Google was even talking up the new font
during the announcement.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f92ptAjm3I>

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f17ujh98k-U)

------
rprasad
This site contains a stack overflow bug which crashes Firefox and IE9 on
Windows.

Flagged.

~~~
conradfr
Yep my Firefox (on Win64) had a hard time loading it and became very slow,
Chrome was fine.

------
epo
"Android can be beautiful" eh? Saying it doesn't make it so. As an aspiration
it is so far from current reality as to be simply delusional.

