

Android Design Philosophy (or the lack thereof) - noelsequeira
http://dcurt.is/2011/10/19/android-design-philosophy/

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Kylekramer
Might just be a matter of personal taste, but I like it. I think the web model
of design works fine. Survival of the fittest has done pretty well in history.
Cream will rise to the top (MySpace vs. Facebook), standards will populate,
and the experimentation allowed without a HIG leads to a more interesting, and
over time, better experience. Even right now, I don't use a single ugly
Android app. Sure, the average app may look like a car wreck, but 90% of
everything is crud.

I'd rather have the ones with talent experiment so the best get better than
enforce guidelines so everything is mediocre.

~~~
recoiledsnake
That still doesn't explain why Android apps are overall not as good as
compared to other platforms. The same common apps made by the same companies
look very different on iOS, Android and WP7. And frequently, they look the
worst on Android. This partly could be because they may not invest as much on
Android versions as on iOS or just make quick ports but the platform design
tools and the expectations of potential customers also come into play.

Since iOS and WP7 provide a built-in look and feel and UI philosopy,
developers on a budget can still produce decent looking and behaving apps
whereas in Android, it results in a functional but bare looking UI.

Case in point, a summer intern at work was tasked with making a basic notes
mobile app. He picked Android because that's the phone his dad had and because
the company wasn't really interested in the app except as a learning
experience for the intern so they weren't interested in buying Mac hardware
and developer license(a point in Android's favor). The final app lacked sorely
in both design and functionality (more because he wasn't really experienced in
coding). I asked him during the demo if he could use some of the Android API
transitions and animations between the screens to jazz it up quicky (those
make a big difference when presenting to non-technical folks). The reply was
that there were none(I am just reporting what he said, I haven't taken a look
at the APIs).

I do know that iOS and WP7 provide built-in animations and transitions. The
point is that you have to go out of your way to make mediocre looking apps in
iOS/WP7 and good looking apps in Android. Add to that the fact that Android
didn't even have GPU acceleration for the UI till Honeycomb(a tablet only
release). <http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914>

Some companies prefer to roll their own custom look and feel (like the web.)
But there's nothing in iOS and WP7 which prevents you from doing exactly that
if you so wish, you're not beholden to the UI philosophy of the OS and can
possibly make any design that you can in Android.

~~~
mdwrigh2
There are Android animations [1][2], not sure how they compare to WP7 or iOS
though.

[1]: [http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/view-
anim...](http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/view-
animation.html) [2]: [http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/animation-in-...](http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/2011/02/animation-in-honeycomb.html)

------
Osiris
_“Instead, I offer the web. Here there’s beautiful examples of very
customized, very different feeling websites.”_

I think Duarte has the right idea, but I think it overlooks something very
important: It's really hard to make a great looking website. It takes a lot of
design skill, graphic art work, and lots of experience with HTML, CSS and
JavaScript.

Where Android is failing is providing a way for new developers with little
design experience to make great looking apps that fit in with the rest of the
OS. They should be providing awesome built-in UI objects and containers that
provide great look and feel.

If a developer wants to go their own way and make their app look totally
different, they don't _have_ to use the built-in UI elements.

They should provide a solid foundation for anyone to make great looking apps,
but not _require_ that it be used, or even make the framework extensible and
flexible.

I've been looking at the WebOS SDK recently and it only takes a few lines of
JavaScript to build nice looking apps because all the components are provided.
You can still make your own custom components if you want to. Layout is done
with various built-in layout components with nice options. The tutorial
example has a nice looking interface by the second lesson without any design
or graphics work at all.

So, Android should provide a UI platform but still allow developers the
flexibility to do what they want. They get the best of both worlds.

~~~
div
Reading the actual interview, it seems that they're working on this:

> Matias also told me that a new style guide was being prepped for developers
> with lots of off-the-rack pieces that would make it easier for third-parties
> to create the same kind of streamlined, beautiful applications I saw in Ice
> Cream Sandwich.

That short paragraph can mean a lot, here's to hoping that Google bundles this
information in a way that is both:

\- enjoyable for a developer without much design skills

\- easy to point a new designer to so he can build up a rough framework of how
to design for Android

Please Google, just don't scatter this info across developer.android.com in
that crappy badly thought out tree structure :/

~~~
Osiris
Yeah, I saw that too. One sentence about a new UI framework hardly inspired
confidence. Let's hope they do make it easy like you said.

------
ubercore
You know, as a recent convert, I still haven't seen the clearly better app
quality that everyone's been talking about. Maybe it's just the apps I use,
but I generally find the quality to be about the same, overall.

Android's system preferences and overall look seems _more_ polished to me.

~~~
ajross
The market app quality thing is mostly bunk. For a while, there was a period
where the iPhone gold rush drove all the developers there. All the polished
apps arrived first for iOS, and the Android market was filled with what
amounted to bad clones of the known iPhone hits.

But that was (comparatively) long ago. All the "hit" apps are cross platform
now. They generally look the same. Some are better on iOS (Facebook is a good
example, though their recent Android releases have gotten a lot better) some
on Android (Google Maps on the iPhone was a bad joke, last I checked, and
there's no good competitor to use instead). The tier below that is mixed on
both platforms, and there's plenty of junk to go around everywhere.

But that first year and a half still colors people's perceptions. So the
canard gets trotted out every time someone wants to play the flame game.

And I tend to agree, actually, that Google has the cleaner and better core UI
at this point. Apple wins on the "performance polish" issues: the devices are
faster and better tuned, UI interaction is (often vastly) snappier. But I find
the actual user experience to be better on Gingerbread than iOS 4 (haven't
tried ICS or iOS 5 yet), frankly.

~~~
hospadam
I have used both iOS and Android extensively. I like most of the "core"
(email, browser, maps, navigation) apps better on Android - but I still find
their third party apps mostly 'behind' their iOS counterparts. While everyone
will use different apps - here is a list of apps I use almost daily on the
iPhone which have no (or poor) counterparts on Android:

Instapaper (Read It Later is pretty good - though their iOS app is much
better, too) Instagram AirVideo AlienBlue Reeder DipTic

These are the apps which I classify as "almost" as good as their iOS
counterparts: Twitter Any of the 'Photo Editing'-of-the-day apps FourSquare

~~~
revorad
Isn't Lightbox a good alternative to Instagram on Android?

~~~
hospadam
I don't need duplicated functionality - I need an actual Instagram app. It's
not so much the photosharing/editing, it's sharing pictures on their network
with my Instagram friends.

~~~
revorad
They're working on an Android app. Hopefully it'll be out soon.

------
mladenkovacevic
I kinda agree with Duarte on this one. An OS should just be a window into the
content, not its master. And the content should be as diverse in style as
there are cultures/tastes/fetishes on the planet.

I love those annual Best of the Web design recognitions. They are all so
differently beautiful in appearance and function. It would be boring if they
all followed the same theme or trend.

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fleitz
Most people aren't designers, the point of hiring designers and doing things
like the HIG are so that regular programmers can create pretty good looking
apps out of the box.

Yes, the guys at Flipboard will probably be able to out do the HIG but it's a
great starting point. Not having a HIG means that regular programmers will
have to reinvent the HIG themselves.

I've had app rejections for HIG violations and to be honest I'm sure I could
have kept my bad design if I replaced some stock Apple buttons with my own,
but when I thought about it it made a lot more sense to just go with the HIG.
(I was using a detail disclosure button for a login button)

------
recoiledsnake
The two paragraphs above the quoted ones are interesting too, for context:

>“There’s this thing that’s happening right now in user interface design that
I find kind of shackling. The faux wood paneling trend, and the airport
lavatory signage trend.” He laughs when he says this and pulls up a slide on
his computer, a split screen of an Atari 2600 and… airport lavatory signage.
It’s an obvious dig at both Apple and Microsoft.

>But what about Microsoft and their “authentically digital” design? “The
problem with going too starkly systematic, forcing everything into this
completely constrained, modernist palette, for both of them, you’re not
leaving any room for the content to express itself.”

