Absolutely, I'll admit that straight away. It's very much a different expectation of how you use it, and I think that's at the core of Gruber's complaint. He is

Absolutely, I'll admit that straight away. It's very much a different expectation of how you use it, and I think that's at the core of Gruber's complaint. He is very used to the iPhone paradigm, where you engage with those bite-sized pieces and then you stop and go do something else. His complaint seems to be that Android doesn't really have bite-sized pieces like that which flatly trump their iOS couterparts, but I think it misses the point because Android isn't just an ugly iPhone, it's a completely different approach to mobile computing. He's effectively asking "Why isn't the Nexus One a better iPhone than my iPhone?" which...just completely misses the point. The iPhone does the iPhone experience extremely well, and I don't think you'll find many people who will seriously argue that the iPhone UX isn't amazingly polished, but the assumption that it's the only way to use a mobile phone is naturally going to lead you into some completely wrong conclusions. If your whole world is the iPhone, the concept of Android intents and what they mean for how you use your phone is going to be completely lost on you. I think that "beautiful" apps start with the platform. Most people would agree that OS X has better aesthetic sense than Windows, and most would agree that iOS has better aesthetic sense than Android. Each platform establishes a baseline for what apps should look like, and apps tend to conform to that baseline for the sake of uniformity. On Windows, the worst-looking apps are the ones that diverge from the OS baseline (I'm looking at you, iTunes and anything that uses GTK+). Android's baseline is pretty low - it's highly utilitarian and very typical of Google, which is famous for doing all of its UI design based on how things test out, and while there are some apps that diverge and look good (Twitter, Tweetdeck), there are others that are just terribly bad (Fring, for example). My hope is that Gingerbread raises that baseline, and sets a new visual target for developers to hit with their apps. We'll see.