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.
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".
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...
Unfortunately, your phone with Android is not a computing platform, because you cannot run everything you want on it without jailbreak. I needed to root my phone (Google Nexus Galaxy, unlocked) and void warranty to install jellybean :(
Google makes it a bit easier, ... Yet, my iphone is also jailbroken and I can run anything. I would love to have a truly open phone with a truly open-source os (like Maemo was). No cripple-ware like Android and iOS.
You did not "jailbreak" your phone. You merely ran the company provided developer tools to unlock the boot loader. You did not need to crack any security and you can be confident that the unlock tools will work just fine on next version of the OS. You can re-lock the boot loader so I would imagine that it would be hard for anyone to figure out that you've tampered with it.
It is also possible to run any standard app without unlocking the boot loader. You only need to unlock or root your phone for non-standard apps or modified versions of the operating system.
This is not at all the same thing as iOS jailbreaking and the level of control iOS exerts. It might be nice to support a stock way of using root, but the fact that I can run any program developed according to the standard OS apis is enough for me to consider it a proper computing device.
My definition would have at minimum:
(1) Be able to run any app designed for the system.
(2) Be able to buy or receive apps from any source.
sorry, maybe I was not clear. Some devices running Android you have to "jailbreak" (this depends on the carrier/ manufacturer). I bought the google nexus galaxy exactly, because I just need to unlock the boot loader and can get root on it.
I just have the feeling that Google gets too much praise for their "open" Android. It's not my definition of "open" (especially in the light of their current threat towards acer http://marketingland.com/google-acer-android-aliyun-21631 )
I think I agree with you it's a computing platform (if talking about the Nexus brand). Yet, the kindle fire for example is not a computing platform (also running Android). iOS feels more like an appliance (although with the $70 developer program bonus you can do mostly anything you want with it... until Apple revokes your dev certificate :). Yet, I would love to have a really open computing platform (like Maemo was) for my phone.
edit: clarifying that I mean the nexus brand concering the 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.
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.