I agree. Comparing my personal experience with iOS and Android development, it's much easier to make a decent looking app on iOS because the standard UI element

I agree. Comparing my personal experience with iOS and Android development, it's much easier to make a decent looking app on iOS because the standard UI elements look good out of the box. I said decent, not great. You run the danger of your app looking too much like the Settings app. (Go to the App Store to see what I mean) However, that can be easily fixed with an SDK update of the UI elements. The bigger problem, IMHO, is Eclipse. Each update of the Android SDK improves the designer in Eclipse, but it's still very awkward to use. The giant properties list is a mess. If Google wants prettier Android apps, it needs to fix Eclipse, or bite the bullet and build a standalone interface builder that treats android views as first class objects. The views are already very loosely coupled from the view controllers, so going to a separate app to deal with the view shouldn't be too bad. Google also needs to populate the standard template with sane defaults. When I say File -> New project, Google should give me a good looking app out of the box. It wasn't until the latest SDK that the designer defaulted to the Nexus One resolution of 480x800. Before that, they were still defaulting to really low resolutions devices (e.g., QVGA). I don't know anyone in my circle of peers with less than 480x800--and this includes non-techies with old/free/cheap Android phones. Secondly, no one uses the "title bar" and that is the first edit I make to the app manifest and designer. Take that out. The default background is black, but very few of the apps I have installed on my phone use a black background. Most are white. I could go on, but this post is already too long.