7 ms·

I think it's the standard that is set by the original creator of the UI widgets available on the platform, in this case, Apple vs. Google. I'm an iPhone UI des

I think it's the standard that is set by the original creator of the UI widgets available on the platform, in this case, Apple vs. Google. I'm an iPhone UI designer/developer and you can make a really nice looking app without doing any custom design work just by using the widgets that Apple provides. A good example of an app that was nearly all stock is Tweetie 1 for iPhone and it won an Apple Design Award. Apple has put an incredible amount of polish (single-pixel highlights and shadows, consistent sheen/gloss across elements, built-in animations for common interactions) into the widgets as part of UIKit, and then the apps that are included on the iPhone are also incredibly polished. This sets the bar very high and also gives a quality of UI design that developers can look up to and try to emulate. The apps that Google built for Android (Maps in particular) are very clean and elegant but I would hesitate to call them beautiful or extremely polished. Google's design aesthetic typically eschews gradients, sheen, highlights and shadows in favor of a flatter, cleaner look and feel. Although Google's Android apps are well-designed, they don't look like a team of visual designers hand-crafted each and every corner like Apple's apps and UIKit widgets seem to be. Because of this cleaner, simpler aesthetic, the bar for "good-looking" on Android is a lot lower than for iPhone and it seems companies will cut corners on Android app UI design & visual polish because of it. Another theory is that companies might feel that Android phone owners are more technical, more geeky, and thus "don't need" a really polished interface so they spend fewer resources on it. Once a few big companies release Android apps with a sub-par design, other companies see this and follow suit, continuing the trend forwards. Obviously this is a difficult stigma to get out of, but some companies are putting out great Android apps -- Gowalla comes to mind -- so there is hope.

rodh257 16y ago
In regards to the last paragraph, I agree, I think that you're more likely to see bad reviews for 'app is ugly' on the IOS app store than you are on Android. If the users really want applications to look good they need to negatively review poorly polished applications. Most of the time if the app functions correctly, reviews will be positive.
Zev 16y ago
I mostly agree with you. The exception is the last paragraph. To me, the last paragraph reads along the lines of "Silly person, engineers can't design. Only a designer can add polish to something. Go back to your coding hole and don't even bother trying." Which is bullshit. // edit: To clarify, a good app should most definitely have a designer, and a UI framework on the scale of Android's should have many, for sure. I'm just objecting to how the tone of the last paragraph felt.
MichaelApproved 16y ago
That doesn't excuse the apps that actually write an entire UI from scratch. As I mentioned before, the CNBC app is all custom UI, beautiful and mostly entirely self-contained. However, the android version is a POS thats essentially just a mobile webpage. Built in OS UI is not a factor here. I suspect budget isn't either. Edit: Here's the link to their Android app. The screen you see is basically the whole app. Click on anything and you're sent to their mobile web http://www.cnbc.com/id/37130092/ http://www.cnbc.com/id/37130092/ Here's the iPhone app http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cnbc-real-time/id334125582?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cnbc-real-time/id334125582?mt... It's hard to believe the same company released both apps. Even their official "Apps" page has little mention of the Android app http://www.cnbc.com/id/33077961 http://www.cnbc.com/id/33077961 It's just a tiny link at the bottom that I didn't notice the first time.
- richcollins 16y ago
  both apps are as hideously busy as their TV broadcasts
  - aerique 16y ago
    Also know as Angry Fruit Salad: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/angry_fruit_salad https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/angry_fruit_...
- trythis 16y ago
  Actually, there are quite a lot of standard UIKit objects used in the iPhone version, so it definitely isn't written from scratch. Granted, it doesn't explain why the Android version makes such a poor showing, since I'm pretty sure Android has equivalents for a lot of those elements. There are, however, so many possible reasons why Android versions get the shaft that it's nearly impossible to say why any given pair of apps are so different in quality. It could be that it's easier to find iOS devs that really care about UX and polish (lots of self-selection going on here, similar to Mac/Windows third-party devs). It could be that a company asks their iOS dev to knock out an Android version, when they're not competent at developing for the platform. It could be that the folks in charge of getting mobile apps made for their company just like iPhones more (not a stretch, given demographic differences) or see them as more hip or marketable and funnel more money that way. Or, it could be that, after spending lavish amounts of money on the iPhone app and seeing it not set the world on fire, they scale back to merely "establishing a presence" on Android instead of making the same effort. A lot of these behaviors wouldn't surprise me, particularly from companies whose primary business is not creating software.
redthrowaway 16y ago
Android has more market share than iOS, which would seem to suggest it's moved far beyond the "technical, geeky" crowd. My hunch is that we're starting to see a Windows/Mac differentiation here, with Android emerging as the clear winner of mobile and iOS being reserved for the trendy/artistic/quality crowd. That carries over into the apps themselves, with Android apps (like their windows counterparts) being clean and utilitarian, whereas iOS developers are devoting more time to making sure their app looks good. Edit: The "quality" comment was not intended to suggest that Android lacks it, but rather that those who buy based upon perceived quality would be more likely to be drawn to the iPhone.
- grandalf 16y ago
  That's a fairly optimistic view. My take is that most purchasers of Android phones are probably quite disappointed with the experience. Whether it's because of battery life, lousy app selection, annoying add-ons by the carrier, or clunky app design. Sure, slimy salespeople hired by the carriers are pushing Android phones and probably lying about features and quality just as they lie about plan details, etc. Yes they're selling a lot of (mediocre) phones to a lot of naive (or optimistic) people who trust the Google name based on their experience with search or gmail. I predict a huge backlash as more and more consumers realize they were hoodwinked and should have just gone with an iPhone. Take the Evo 4G for example... the phone shipped unable to even last a whole day on a full charge (with moderate use). This is unconscionable. Clearly nobody who was in a postion to do something about this test drove one of the phones for a few days before moving forward with all the hype and marketing. I think this will all bite Google when few people decide to upgrade to a new Android phone. The experience is so mediocre that even a few minutes playing with an iPhone, browsing the app store, or talking to the owner about battery life will cause tremendous buyers remorse.
  - irons 16y ago
    I'm not sure they're disappointed, per se. The non-nerds I know who bought Android phones are generally pretty pleased to be able to make calls and use the web a bit. They're not app consumers to the slightest degree. Android represents a small value-add over the dumbphones they had before, which is fine, but they're not part of the vast army that Android partisans seem to think is coming over the next hill.
karolist 16y ago
Building a nice looking app for android is really tough, as you say - there's no nice looking builtin widgets and even if they were you couldn't use them to get a consistent experience because of the theming support - your app might still look ugly green on some phones and not others. You have to build lots of stuff from scratch, but paring this with generally poor view drawing performance of the java platform and bugs that are still there - many simply do not bother enough. I've spent way more time than I've expected to get the tabs working the way I want in my test app on android, effects framework is nice but performance on my 1ghz Desire HD was suboptimal when doing some transitions on top of custom backgrounds.
blub 16y ago
"The apps that Google built for Android (Maps in particular) are very clean and elegant but I would hesitate to call them beautiful or extremely polished. Google's design aesthetic typically eschews gradients, sheen, highlights and shadows in favor of a flatter, cleaner look and feel. " Your post is very confusing. At first you seem to imply that good design is tied to the amount of shadows, gradients or highlights and that a "clean, elegant" design is somehow worse. Yet later you say that Google's apps are well-designed... Why not use accurate design concepts if you claim that you are a designer? Say exactly what's wrong with the design by pointing out which design rules were broken.
- ThomPete 16y ago
  Design is not only about aesthetics. It's as much about how it works. You can have a well designed app that isn't necessarily beautiful. All Google stuff is by definition not beautiful, that doesn't mean it's not well designed.
  - blub 16y ago
    It depends what you're designing for. If you're designing for more clicks, more ad glances, cross-promoting your services, you can say that Google's stuff is well designed and that it works - because these are the metrics that they use to evaluate their design. When we're talking about "graphic design", beauty automatically flows from good design and Google's products are simply not well designed. And they will not be, because they micro-optimize for what brings more users.
    - ThomPete 16y ago
      I am not sure what you are getting at here. All discussion about design must be understood in context. The context here is the iPhone vs. Android GUI. I responded to the claim that flyosity's comment was somehow contradictory. It's not. It's just a matter of understanding that design in this context isn't only about the beauty.

rodh257 16y ago

In regards to the last paragraph, I agree, I think that you're more likely to see bad reviews for 'app is ugly' on the IOS app store than you are on Android. If the users really want applications to look good they need to negatively review poorly polished applications. Most of the time if the app functions correctly, reviews will be positive.

Zev 16y ago

I mostly agree with you. The exception is the last paragraph. To me, the last paragraph reads along the lines of "Silly person, engineers can't design. Only a designer can add polish to something. Go back to your coding hole and don't even bother trying." Which is bullshit. // edit: To clarify, a good app should most definitely have a designer, and a UI framework on the scale of Android's should have many, for sure. I'm just objecting to how the tone of the last paragraph felt.

MichaelApproved 16y ago

That doesn't excuse the apps that actually write an entire UI from scratch. As I mentioned before, the CNBC app is all custom UI, beautiful and mostly entirely self-contained. However, the android version is a POS thats essentially just a mobile webpage. Built in OS UI is not a factor here. I suspect budget isn't either. Edit: Here's the link to their Android app. The screen you see is basically the whole app. Click on anything and you're sent to their mobile web http://www.cnbc.com/id/37130092/ http://www.cnbc.com/id/37130092/ Here's the iPhone app http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cnbc-real-time/id334125582?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cnbc-real-time/id334125582?mt... It's hard to believe the same company released both apps. Even their official "Apps" page has little mention of the Android app http://www.cnbc.com/id/33077961 http://www.cnbc.com/id/33077961 It's just a tiny link at the bottom that I didn't notice the first time.

richcollins 16y ago
both apps are as hideously busy as their TV broadcasts
- aerique 16y ago
  Also know as Angry Fruit Salad: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/angry_fruit_salad https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/angry_fruit_...
trythis 16y ago
Actually, there are quite a lot of standard UIKit objects used in the iPhone version, so it definitely isn't written from scratch. Granted, it doesn't explain why the Android version makes such a poor showing, since I'm pretty sure Android has equivalents for a lot of those elements. There are, however, so many possible reasons why Android versions get the shaft that it's nearly impossible to say why any given pair of apps are so different in quality. It could be that it's easier to find iOS devs that really care about UX and polish (lots of self-selection going on here, similar to Mac/Windows third-party devs). It could be that a company asks their iOS dev to knock out an Android version, when they're not competent at developing for the platform. It could be that the folks in charge of getting mobile apps made for their company just like iPhones more (not a stretch, given demographic differences) or see them as more hip or marketable and funnel more money that way. Or, it could be that, after spending lavish amounts of money on the iPhone app and seeing it not set the world on fire, they scale back to merely "establishing a presence" on Android instead of making the same effort. A lot of these behaviors wouldn't surprise me, particularly from companies whose primary business is not creating software.

redthrowaway 16y ago

Android has more market share than iOS, which would seem to suggest it's moved far beyond the "technical, geeky" crowd. My hunch is that we're starting to see a Windows/Mac differentiation here, with Android emerging as the clear winner of mobile and iOS being reserved for the trendy/artistic/quality crowd. That carries over into the apps themselves, with Android apps (like their windows counterparts) being clean and utilitarian, whereas iOS developers are devoting more time to making sure their app looks good. Edit: The "quality" comment was not intended to suggest that Android lacks it, but rather that those who buy based upon perceived quality would be more likely to be drawn to the iPhone.

grandalf 16y ago
That's a fairly optimistic view. My take is that most purchasers of Android phones are probably quite disappointed with the experience. Whether it's because of battery life, lousy app selection, annoying add-ons by the carrier, or clunky app design. Sure, slimy salespeople hired by the carriers are pushing Android phones and probably lying about features and quality just as they lie about plan details, etc. Yes they're selling a lot of (mediocre) phones to a lot of naive (or optimistic) people who trust the Google name based on their experience with search or gmail. I predict a huge backlash as more and more consumers realize they were hoodwinked and should have just gone with an iPhone. Take the Evo 4G for example... the phone shipped unable to even last a whole day on a full charge (with moderate use). This is unconscionable. Clearly nobody who was in a postion to do something about this test drove one of the phones for a few days before moving forward with all the hype and marketing. I think this will all bite Google when few people decide to upgrade to a new Android phone. The experience is so mediocre that even a few minutes playing with an iPhone, browsing the app store, or talking to the owner about battery life will cause tremendous buyers remorse.
- irons 16y ago
  I'm not sure they're disappointed, per se. The non-nerds I know who bought Android phones are generally pretty pleased to be able to make calls and use the web a bit. They're not app consumers to the slightest degree. Android represents a small value-add over the dumbphones they had before, which is fine, but they're not part of the vast army that Android partisans seem to think is coming over the next hill.

karolist 16y ago

Building a nice looking app for android is really tough, as you say - there's no nice looking builtin widgets and even if they were you couldn't use them to get a consistent experience because of the theming support - your app might still look ugly green on some phones and not others. You have to build lots of stuff from scratch, but paring this with generally poor view drawing performance of the java platform and bugs that are still there - many simply do not bother enough. I've spent way more time than I've expected to get the tabs working the way I want in my test app on android, effects framework is nice but performance on my 1ghz Desire HD was suboptimal when doing some transitions on top of custom backgrounds.

blub 16y ago

"The apps that Google built for Android (Maps in particular) are very clean and elegant but I would hesitate to call them beautiful or extremely polished. Google's design aesthetic typically eschews gradients, sheen, highlights and shadows in favor of a flatter, cleaner look and feel. " Your post is very confusing. At first you seem to imply that good design is tied to the amount of shadows, gradients or highlights and that a "clean, elegant" design is somehow worse. Yet later you say that Google's apps are well-designed... Why not use accurate design concepts if you claim that you are a designer? Say exactly what's wrong with the design by pointing out which design rules were broken.

ThomPete 16y ago
Design is not only about aesthetics. It's as much about how it works. You can have a well designed app that isn't necessarily beautiful. All Google stuff is by definition not beautiful, that doesn't mean it's not well designed.
- blub 16y ago
  It depends what you're designing for. If you're designing for more clicks, more ad glances, cross-promoting your services, you can say that Google's stuff is well designed and that it works - because these are the metrics that they use to evaluate their design. When we're talking about "graphic design", beauty automatically flows from good design and Google's products are simply not well designed. And they will not be, because they micro-optimize for what brings more users.
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    I am not sure what you are getting at here. All discussion about design must be understood in context. The context here is the iPhone vs. Android GUI. I responded to the claim that flyosity's comment was somehow contradictory. It's not. It's just a matter of understanding that design in this context isn't only about the beauty.