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Honestly, in terms of staff UI design cred Android is in better place than iOS right now. With the Sidekick, PalmOS, and then Material Design, Matías Duarte ha

Honestly, in terms of staff UI design cred Android is in better place than iOS right now. With the Sidekick, PalmOS, and then Material Design, Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design. Jony Ive is probably the most brilliant consumer electronics hardware designer in the world, but I have yet to see any indication that he has any idea how to lead a platform UI design project. I had issues with Scott Forstall's style, but he was at least leading the charge somewhere. In my opinion, force click, Siri, 3D wallpapers, etc, have not been major coups in terms of UI finesse. At best Apple is in a holding pattern right now, I haven't seen any indication that they're pushing the state of the art outside of the hardware. The animations keep getting flashier and smoother, but that's not really UI design. I thought Ive's strong understanding of design methodology would be enough, but I think maybe software design requires a different way of thinking. I don't know.

nipponese 10y ago
It's hard to buy that argument. It doesn't appear Material ever attempted to be better than iOS, just different. And now Google Design is quietly backtracking (dialogs are transitioning to iOS action sheets, hamburger button is being phased out for bottom tab navigation). And now the phone even looks even more like an iPhone. Let's be honest, there are only two rules for design at Google: "Not Apple" and "good enough".
- Larrikin 10y ago
  Honestly I notice more Android on my iPad than I notice iOS on my phone. iOS finally got custom keyboards so I can use a proper mobile keyboard like Swype, the notification panel isn't as useless as it was and is a lot richer like on Android. Its really only a matter of time until iOS introduces widgets on the home screen. I've convinced more than a couple people to switch to Android for their phone simply because you can have your calendar and todo list right where you can always see it. Were hamburger buttons an Android thing? I noticed them everywhere, including on the web.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    > Were hamburger buttons an Android thing? I noticed them everywhere, including on the web. More of a Twitter Bootstrap thing, I think.
    - panglott 10y ago
      I had also thought that it was more of an Android thing. But apparently it's been the rat in the walls of computer UI since the 1980s on the Xerox Star and DOS, now blown up by Twitter and Facebook. https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/ https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/
- criddell 10y ago
  IMHO, Google should use Material Design for their Android applications, but it doesn't belong in iOS applications.
  - vaishaksuresh 10y ago
    I second this.Gmail is something that I use regularly on iOS and the interface is so ancient compared to gmail on Android. This is true for a lot of applications except maybe google photos.
    - obtino 10y ago
      Outlook (for iOS) does a better job of managing Gmail in iOS than the official app.
      - tdkl 10y ago
        It also backups your email to MS servers for free.
      - vaishaksuresh 10y ago
        I'm already regretting giving Google so much of my personal data, no way in Hell am I going to give a copy of it to MS. But I agree about the interface since I use Outlook for work emails.
supercoder 10y ago
Material design is like bootstrap for mobile. Good to give devs something they can't mess up too badly, but is pretty soulless.
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  >but is pretty soulless What does that mean?
  - uptown 10y ago
    It's kinda like reference hardware. It's the baseline, with nothing special or unique. It takes a talented designer to take the toolkit and design language, and extend those to inject their own style and character into the finished product so that it both solves the specific needs of the product being designed by clarifying the interface to the user - and hopefully delights the user in some way to make the experience of using the app not just tolerable but delightful.
    - gnarbarian 10y ago
      So, in a sense material design is too restrictive to let designers think outside of the box. I get that opinion. But allow me to play the devil's advocate: Mobile interfaces are small and restrictive. Touch screens and gestures have zero discoverability. Interfaces must scale to a multitude of different screen sizes and resolutions. Flare hurts usability in these situations. When designers break convention it is far more likely to result in confusion or frustration by end users. Well defined standards can enable me to use your app without even looking at the screen and drastically improve accessibility for things like screen readers. I think the tendency toward flare stems from design education that emphasizes print media and tries to make a direct translation into Web/UX Design. Print media, and advertisements are meant to grab your attention, establish unique brand design language and brand identity. But If I'm already on your website or using your app you already have my attention. You've already sold me. Now simply help me accomplish the task I am here for in the least painful way possilbe. Branching out beyond common guidelines and creating new interface conventions may scratch your creative itch but it is rarely more efficient or easy to use that established conventions.
asdf333 10y ago
I don't think UI is the issue. Coming from someone who WANTS to love android for philosophical reasons and bought the google nexus, google nexus 5x. I always went back to iphone. The biggest issue is the device is not very good in comparison to the current gen iphone. It feels 1-2 gen behind in performance.
- kaishiro 10y ago
  How so, exactly? I have a 5x myself and have never felt this to be the case.
- TheLilHipster 10y ago
  Eh? I still use a first generation Nexus 5. SNES/N64/PSP emulators run like a dream. Apps open/transition instantly. What performance metric are you even using?
  - talideon 10y ago
    In a nutshell: Android itself isn't actually any slower, but it _seems_ slower due to garbage collection pauses. When Android stutters, you can put money on it being down to the garbage collector running at an inopportune moment. This is the downside of most Android apps being built in Java, whereas most iOS apps are written in Objective C, which uses reference counting and so you have more deterministic release of allocated memory. The upside of this is little or no stuttering, but the downside is that you can still end up with pauses, but they can be in places which are hidden from the user. The other downside of GC is that developers can lean on it a bit more than is justifiable to create needless duplicates of objects on the assumption that they'll be garbage collected eventually... which can lead to GC stutter. A lot of Android's 'slowness' issues would go away if devs were a bit more careful with how they allocate their objects. Another thing that makes Android seem slower than iOS is that Android gives apps a pretty lengthy grace period when they hang for some reason and will alert the user if it thinks the app has hung. iOS, OTOH, is less tolerant of this kind of thing and will just kill the offending app and rely on the app to restore its state when restarted. This hides a lot of issues with apps on iOS that are more obvious on Android. Which choice is better is a matter of debate: the iOS route gives the better user experience 90% of the time, but when you want that 10%, you really want that 10%. Emulators (and quite a lot of games too) tend to be written in C and C++, which means they do manual memory management or use the conservative Boehm GC, so you end up with little or no GC stutter. OTOH, if the developer isn't careful, you're more likely to end up with memory leaks.
mhomde 10y ago
iOS is in a tough position, the road of incremental changes is coming to an end. The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution. You can kinda see Apple dipping it toes into the widget arena with the notifications area, yet they're probably hesitant to remake the whole home screen and risk alienating their current users. Tech savvy people won't mind a new home screen concept but for the "dad's and mom's out" there it might be a tough sell. Apple's leadership in UI design the last couple of years has been a little lackluster. While they seem to be able to iterate, with a few missteps, I'm less sure about their capability to get a whole revamp done right. The talent is surely there but the question is whether the leadership and willing to take the right risks is. It's going to be interesting going forward, I'm guessing they will have to introduce something widget/tile -ish in the next phone
- Retric 10y ago
  Age is not a sign that's something is broken. Apples main lead is they need much less hardware to get good preformance which means smaller and longer lasting battery's and better profit margins. Giving that up for a useless status screen is a terrace idea that would cost them 10's if not 100's of billions of dollars.
  - mhomde 10y ago
    Nothing wrong with the age of an UI per se, but I think the notion of App's as silos which need to be individually opened get its information is rather old fashioned, and not ideal from an UX POV. Being able to quickly glance information from weather, email, social media does do quite a lot to lessen unnecessary UI excise. I don't think it has anything to do with hardware, they can be engineered in such a way they don't needlessly drain the battery, nor do I think most people would feel it was useless. Then again, people sometimes don't miss something before they have it :)
    - nicky0 10y ago
      iOS does have a widget screen.
dpiers 10y ago
| With the Sidekick, PalmOS, and then Material Design, Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design. Agreed, but with a slight nitpick - Duarte was hired to lead development on Palm's webOS designs. PalmOS was the aging predecessor.
mikeryan 10y ago
Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design. This is a pretty subjective statement. It seems that a lot of Duarte's designs are somewhat derivative. Material extends MS's Flat design. I'm also not sure how much of that is Duarte, its a pretty open secret that Google makes use of some pretty high end digital agencies who aren't allowed to let folks know what they're working on. WebOS was pretty tacky though an interesting OS design - actually implemented better by LG on their SmartTVs. The Sidekick may have been his most interesting product but it was completely broadsided by the release of the iPhone and was n't anywhere near competitive to the Blackberry so I'm not sure how innovative it was. If anything Duarte's had pretty good record for working on products with innovative features but never necessarily ground breaking on UI/UX
- atourgates 10y ago
  > WebOS was pretty tacky though an interesting OS design - actually implemented better by LG on their SmartTVs. I've got to stop you there. WebOS was far ahead of its time, and especially considered in the context of a small startup going against established players, was brilliant. It offered in some ways better and more intuitive usability than iOS, along with a great app development ecosystem and philosophy. Palm's WebOS devices were a pleasure to use, in a time when that was a very rare thing for a mobile device.
  - newman314 10y ago
    Agreed. WebOS was the only other OS other than iOS that offered the singular upgrade experience. It was clunky under the hood and never received enough love. It would have been interesting to see where WebOS (phone) would be today had Palm survived.
  - armandososa 10y ago
    Was Palm a small startup? I think it was more like the last effort of a company on it's way out.
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    Preware was one of the most amazing pieces of software I've ever seen on mobile (I remember going out at lunch multiple times to hang around a fast public wifi spot to try and download an LDXE-based chroot that was too large for my home connection). Stuff like Xposed is interesting, but I haven't seen any software for mobile that managed to match the kind of community driven tweaking that Preware fostered.
reacharavindh 10y ago
I think it is a matter of personal taste. I personally don't like the material design. I enjoy the thin typography and design of iOS, and finding myself enjoying the experience of "Messages" in iOS at the moment. The "tapback" feature letting me heart/thumbs up some message is elegantly done IMO. And the knowledge that the receiver is also getting it the way I intended is great.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  Design is not a matter of personal taste. It either achieves the goals of the designer or it doesn't. It can be evaluated on a purely objective basis. You're talking about style, which is about expression more than outcomes, and is received in a very personal way. When someone reacts so negatively to material design that they won't use it, that is a failure. There's no matter of opinion there. The purpose of the design work is to make it usable.
  - reacharavindh 10y ago
    "Design is not a matter of personal taste. It either achieves the goals of the designer or it doesn't. " But, what if I like/dislike the designers goals? In other words, if the designer painstakingly crafts a detail I don't care about, does it mean it is a good design? Not trying to prove any point. Just trying to understand your perspective.
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      > In other words, if the designer painstakingly crafts a detail I don't care about, does it mean it is a good design? If that detail helps them achieve their desired business outcomes, then yes. You might not like the product, but the design work is good. If you are trying to weed your garden, a Tesla is not useful to you. That doesn't mean it's a bad design, it just wasn't designed for that particular need. All design comes from a specific set of values, and can only be evaluated within the context of those values. The notion of universal design is a fiction. It's the remnant of the colonialist mindset, where there is a presumption of universal values.
sorenjan 10y ago
Matias Duarte doesn't work on Android anymore. https://twitter.com/MatiasDuarte/status/781132858802909185 https://twitter.com/MatiasDuarte/status/781132858802909185
sangnoir 10y ago
> In my opinion, force click, Siri, 3D wallpapers, etc, have not been major coups in terms of UI finesse. I wouldn't say force click is a coup... it's like Android's menu button in the way it hides functionality and non-standard UX. Heaven knows what's going to happen if I trigger it random app. Google was wise enough to drop the Menu button in Android

nipponese 10y ago

It's hard to buy that argument. It doesn't appear Material ever attempted to be better than iOS, just different. And now Google Design is quietly backtracking (dialogs are transitioning to iOS action sheets, hamburger button is being phased out for bottom tab navigation). And now the phone even looks even more like an iPhone. Let's be honest, there are only two rules for design at Google: "Not Apple" and "good enough".

Larrikin 10y ago
Honestly I notice more Android on my iPad than I notice iOS on my phone. iOS finally got custom keyboards so I can use a proper mobile keyboard like Swype, the notification panel isn't as useless as it was and is a lot richer like on Android. Its really only a matter of time until iOS introduces widgets on the home screen. I've convinced more than a couple people to switch to Android for their phone simply because you can have your calendar and todo list right where you can always see it. Were hamburger buttons an Android thing? I noticed them everywhere, including on the web.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  > Were hamburger buttons an Android thing? I noticed them everywhere, including on the web. More of a Twitter Bootstrap thing, I think.
  - panglott 10y ago
    I had also thought that it was more of an Android thing. But apparently it's been the rat in the walls of computer UI since the 1980s on the Xerox Star and DOS, now blown up by Twitter and Facebook. https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/ https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/
criddell 10y ago
IMHO, Google should use Material Design for their Android applications, but it doesn't belong in iOS applications.
- vaishaksuresh 10y ago
  I second this.Gmail is something that I use regularly on iOS and the interface is so ancient compared to gmail on Android. This is true for a lot of applications except maybe google photos.
  - obtino 10y ago
    Outlook (for iOS) does a better job of managing Gmail in iOS than the official app.
    - tdkl 10y ago
      It also backups your email to MS servers for free.
    - vaishaksuresh 10y ago
      I'm already regretting giving Google so much of my personal data, no way in Hell am I going to give a copy of it to MS. But I agree about the interface since I use Outlook for work emails.

supercoder 10y ago

Material design is like bootstrap for mobile. Good to give devs something they can't mess up too badly, but is pretty soulless.

gnarbarian 10y ago
>but is pretty soulless What does that mean?
- uptown 10y ago
  It's kinda like reference hardware. It's the baseline, with nothing special or unique. It takes a talented designer to take the toolkit and design language, and extend those to inject their own style and character into the finished product so that it both solves the specific needs of the product being designed by clarifying the interface to the user - and hopefully delights the user in some way to make the experience of using the app not just tolerable but delightful.
  - gnarbarian 10y ago
    So, in a sense material design is too restrictive to let designers think outside of the box. I get that opinion. But allow me to play the devil's advocate: Mobile interfaces are small and restrictive. Touch screens and gestures have zero discoverability. Interfaces must scale to a multitude of different screen sizes and resolutions. Flare hurts usability in these situations. When designers break convention it is far more likely to result in confusion or frustration by end users. Well defined standards can enable me to use your app without even looking at the screen and drastically improve accessibility for things like screen readers. I think the tendency toward flare stems from design education that emphasizes print media and tries to make a direct translation into Web/UX Design. Print media, and advertisements are meant to grab your attention, establish unique brand design language and brand identity. But If I'm already on your website or using your app you already have my attention. You've already sold me. Now simply help me accomplish the task I am here for in the least painful way possilbe. Branching out beyond common guidelines and creating new interface conventions may scratch your creative itch but it is rarely more efficient or easy to use that established conventions.

asdf333 10y ago

I don't think UI is the issue. Coming from someone who WANTS to love android for philosophical reasons and bought the google nexus, google nexus 5x. I always went back to iphone. The biggest issue is the device is not very good in comparison to the current gen iphone. It feels 1-2 gen behind in performance.

kaishiro 10y ago
How so, exactly? I have a 5x myself and have never felt this to be the case.
TheLilHipster 10y ago
Eh? I still use a first generation Nexus 5. SNES/N64/PSP emulators run like a dream. Apps open/transition instantly. What performance metric are you even using?
- talideon 10y ago
  In a nutshell: Android itself isn't actually any slower, but it _seems_ slower due to garbage collection pauses. When Android stutters, you can put money on it being down to the garbage collector running at an inopportune moment. This is the downside of most Android apps being built in Java, whereas most iOS apps are written in Objective C, which uses reference counting and so you have more deterministic release of allocated memory. The upside of this is little or no stuttering, but the downside is that you can still end up with pauses, but they can be in places which are hidden from the user. The other downside of GC is that developers can lean on it a bit more than is justifiable to create needless duplicates of objects on the assumption that they'll be garbage collected eventually... which can lead to GC stutter. A lot of Android's 'slowness' issues would go away if devs were a bit more careful with how they allocate their objects. Another thing that makes Android seem slower than iOS is that Android gives apps a pretty lengthy grace period when they hang for some reason and will alert the user if it thinks the app has hung. iOS, OTOH, is less tolerant of this kind of thing and will just kill the offending app and rely on the app to restore its state when restarted. This hides a lot of issues with apps on iOS that are more obvious on Android. Which choice is better is a matter of debate: the iOS route gives the better user experience 90% of the time, but when you want that 10%, you really want that 10%. Emulators (and quite a lot of games too) tend to be written in C and C++, which means they do manual memory management or use the conservative Boehm GC, so you end up with little or no GC stutter. OTOH, if the developer isn't careful, you're more likely to end up with memory leaks.

mhomde 10y ago

iOS is in a tough position, the road of incremental changes is coming to an end. The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution. You can kinda see Apple dipping it toes into the widget arena with the notifications area, yet they're probably hesitant to remake the whole home screen and risk alienating their current users. Tech savvy people won't mind a new home screen concept but for the "dad's and mom's out" there it might be a tough sell. Apple's leadership in UI design the last couple of years has been a little lackluster. While they seem to be able to iterate, with a few missteps, I'm less sure about their capability to get a whole revamp done right. The talent is surely there but the question is whether the leadership and willing to take the right risks is. It's going to be interesting going forward, I'm guessing they will have to introduce something widget/tile -ish in the next phone

Retric 10y ago
Age is not a sign that's something is broken. Apples main lead is they need much less hardware to get good preformance which means smaller and longer lasting battery's and better profit margins. Giving that up for a useless status screen is a terrace idea that would cost them 10's if not 100's of billions of dollars.
- mhomde 10y ago
  Nothing wrong with the age of an UI per se, but I think the notion of App's as silos which need to be individually opened get its information is rather old fashioned, and not ideal from an UX POV. Being able to quickly glance information from weather, email, social media does do quite a lot to lessen unnecessary UI excise. I don't think it has anything to do with hardware, they can be engineered in such a way they don't needlessly drain the battery, nor do I think most people would feel it was useless. Then again, people sometimes don't miss something before they have it :)
  - nicky0 10y ago
    iOS does have a widget screen.

dpiers 10y ago

| With the Sidekick, PalmOS, and then Material Design, Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design. Agreed, but with a slight nitpick - Duarte was hired to lead development on Palm's webOS designs. PalmOS was the aging predecessor.

mikeryan 10y ago

Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design. This is a pretty subjective statement. It seems that a lot of Duarte's designs are somewhat derivative. Material extends MS's Flat design. I'm also not sure how much of that is Duarte, its a pretty open secret that Google makes use of some pretty high end digital agencies who aren't allowed to let folks know what they're working on. WebOS was pretty tacky though an interesting OS design - actually implemented better by LG on their SmartTVs. The Sidekick may have been his most interesting product but it was completely broadsided by the release of the iPhone and was n't anywhere near competitive to the Blackberry so I'm not sure how innovative it was. If anything Duarte's had pretty good record for working on products with innovative features but never necessarily ground breaking on UI/UX

atourgates 10y ago
> WebOS was pretty tacky though an interesting OS design - actually implemented better by LG on their SmartTVs. I've got to stop you there. WebOS was far ahead of its time, and especially considered in the context of a small startup going against established players, was brilliant. It offered in some ways better and more intuitive usability than iOS, along with a great app development ecosystem and philosophy. Palm's WebOS devices were a pleasure to use, in a time when that was a very rare thing for a mobile device.
- newman314 10y ago
  Agreed. WebOS was the only other OS other than iOS that offered the singular upgrade experience. It was clunky under the hood and never received enough love. It would have been interesting to see where WebOS (phone) would be today had Palm survived.
- armandososa 10y ago
  Was Palm a small startup? I think it was more like the last effort of a company on it's way out.
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  Preware was one of the most amazing pieces of software I've ever seen on mobile (I remember going out at lunch multiple times to hang around a fast public wifi spot to try and download an LDXE-based chroot that was too large for my home connection). Stuff like Xposed is interesting, but I haven't seen any software for mobile that managed to match the kind of community driven tweaking that Preware fostered.

reacharavindh 10y ago

I think it is a matter of personal taste. I personally don't like the material design. I enjoy the thin typography and design of iOS, and finding myself enjoying the experience of "Messages" in iOS at the moment. The "tapback" feature letting me heart/thumbs up some message is elegantly done IMO. And the knowledge that the receiver is also getting it the way I intended is great.

erikpukinskis 10y ago
Design is not a matter of personal taste. It either achieves the goals of the designer or it doesn't. It can be evaluated on a purely objective basis. You're talking about style, which is about expression more than outcomes, and is received in a very personal way. When someone reacts so negatively to material design that they won't use it, that is a failure. There's no matter of opinion there. The purpose of the design work is to make it usable.
- reacharavindh 10y ago
  "Design is not a matter of personal taste. It either achieves the goals of the designer or it doesn't. " But, what if I like/dislike the designers goals? In other words, if the designer painstakingly crafts a detail I don't care about, does it mean it is a good design? Not trying to prove any point. Just trying to understand your perspective.
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    > In other words, if the designer painstakingly crafts a detail I don't care about, does it mean it is a good design? If that detail helps them achieve their desired business outcomes, then yes. You might not like the product, but the design work is good. If you are trying to weed your garden, a Tesla is not useful to you. That doesn't mean it's a bad design, it just wasn't designed for that particular need. All design comes from a specific set of values, and can only be evaluated within the context of those values. The notion of universal design is a fiction. It's the remnant of the colonialist mindset, where there is a presumption of universal values.

sorenjan 10y ago

Matias Duarte doesn't work on Android anymore. https://twitter.com/MatiasDuarte/status/781132858802909185 https://twitter.com/MatiasDuarte/status/781132858802909185

sangnoir 10y ago

> In my opinion, force click, Siri, 3D wallpapers, etc, have not been major coups in terms of UI finesse. I wouldn't say force click is a coup... it's like Android's menu button in the way it hides functionality and non-standard UX. Heaven knows what's going to happen if I trigger it random app. Google was wise enough to drop the Menu button in Android