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Stock Android Isn't Perfect: Things I Can't Stand About Jelly Bean

310 points by e1ven 14y ago

roryreiff 14y ago
As an avid iOS user, every time I try and pick up an Android I experience the same types of issues. I wonder whether it actually is a lack of intuition, or that I am so locked into the iOS way that it ends up feeling foreign right from the start. Re: the back button, I am curious how other mobile OSs handle this problem. An obvious solution would be that the OS forces a particular behaviour, but then again, you were referencing default apps with varying implementations. Having never worked with the Android SDK, I wonder if the behaviour is forced on 3rd party apps?
- polshaw 14y ago
  >same types of issues Elaborate please? The only common UX issue i can see here is the back button, most are aesthetic.
- akjetma 14y ago
  As a person who's never had an iPhone/Mac, I experience the same foreign feeling when I use an iOS device. I'm pretty sure this feeling is mostly due to unfamiliarity and not superior design on either side. Although it is worth noting that whenever I've borrowed someone else's Android phone it can be a completely different experience from my own Android device, whereas an iOS user borrowing an iOS device will know exactly how to operate it.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    Yep, I especially get this feeling when using a Mac, from the mouse acceleration curve. It just feels wrong, and I can only use a Mac for a few minutes before my hand starts hurting.
- contextfree 14y ago
  "I wonder whether it actually is a lack of intuition, or that I am so locked into the iOS way that it ends up feeling foreign right from the start." Intuitive means familiar, so the answer is "yes"
  - roryreiff 14y ago
    To elaborate... What informs my thought process as to what I believe will happen when using the interface? Do I think it will behave a certain way because it seems to make the most sense, or because I remember the iOS implementation? Since it's probably fair to assume that my understanding of any UI is going to be derived from some other previously used UI, perhaps the question is a pointless one? I am not sure what the answer is.
- ajross 14y ago
  This is true of every major platform UX change. Everyone hates all platforms except the one they use, except for those rare conversion events where something trips in your brain and you decide to switch. Then you hate what you used to use and everything returns to normal.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  " I wonder whether it actually is a lack of intuition, or that I am so locked into the iOS way that it ends up feeling foreign right from the start" Both, but mostly the latter. If you use both OSes regularly each becomes pretty natural to use. But there are some baffling things in Android that are just too vaguely defined, like the oft-mentioned-here back button. I use Android every day, and I'm still not 100% sure what the backbutton is going to do when I press it, even in apps I use pretty often. Unfortunately fixing this now isn't that easy because each app's Activities gets to choose what happens when the back button is pressed. This is bad for the obvious reason that some developers are bound to do the wrong thing, but made worse by the fact that Google themselves have attempted to "redefine" the back button various times and each attempt has made things more confusing (IMO).
j_baker 14y ago
The back button issue for me is the biggest one. The back button is such a useful thing to have, but the inconsistency of its behavior is sometimes mind-boggling.
- FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
  I think Android is great, but this inconsistency is what spoils it. I still get tripped up when I click the back button in the browser, and it boots me back to the home screen and not the previous item in my browser history. Never mind having the concept of 'windows' with zero visual cue that a page loaded in a new window, and not the existing one. There wouldn't be much of a problem but the stock apps set expectations that are rarely delivered upon anywhere else. You're trained to long-press an item to perform an action on that specific item. This won't work in every app: in some caes you might have to swipe it, iPhone style; in others, it's just not possible. I would still use Android over an iPhone, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
- perishabledave 14y ago
  Agreed. I constantly get confused when using the play store. If I navigate to an app detail view, do I press the back button or the top left navigation button to get back to the list? Shouldn't it be intuitive enough for me to know without having to memorize its behavior?
guelo 14y ago
The back button in previous Androids was mostly fine with a few overloaded functions that led to some understandable inconsistencies. It might get stuck going backwards in the browser or it might dismiss a dialog or keyboard instead of going to the previous screen, but the annoyances were minor. To fix this they inexplicably added a second iOS-style header back button (which is called Up even though it is normally shown with a left pointer). The combination of two back buttons and the difficulty of understanding it, even for developers who have read the long style guide[1], is an absolutely baffling design decision. There is no way that users can intuitively learn what these buttons do. Add the inconsistent implementations and it's a usability nightmare. [1] http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html
- gbog 14y ago
  It is not two back buttons. It is like a browser: a history back button at browser level, and a suggested top left clickable app icon that usually brings you to app main screen, or some intermediary hub screen if the app is really multiple apps bundled in one. It's true that it can be confusing at times but the reason is that of inconsistencies and some bad behavior of some apps, eg hooking the back button. Don't think people are that stupid, they can understand such a simple model.
  - fireflash38 14y ago
    It becomes frustrating when the activity stack is invisible, but still accumulating additional activities in app. Old Gmail was especially egregious with this, where you could hit the back button 10+ times and end up switching between emails you've viewed days previously before you actually back out of the app. I love the general idea of the separate Up and Back, but I'd compare it to XP-era Windows explorer rather than a browser (though both are valid comparisons, I just think Explorer is closer). It just runs into issues where the developers have to try to divine what exactly you are wanting to do at each instance when you hit back. Sometimes users want to go back to where they were before when they hit back, sometimes they want to go 'back' to the home screen of an app - this is what the 'Up' navigation button should exist as, but seldom does. What about if you go Up in app, then hit the back button? Should you exit out of the app? Go back to where you were in app? Go back to the previous app? All are valid cases. It really does all come down to consistency.
mikeevans 14y ago
My main disagreement with these is regarding Google Voice. >If this is a texting app, why is it called "Voice"? Because it's not just a texting app. It does voicemail and "makes calls" as well. Otherwise, most of his other complaints are valid and inconsistent.
- rtkwe 14y ago
  That and the horizontal complaint are the ones I don't really get. Horizontal doesn't really make sense as a horizontal orientation. And orientation changes with widgets on the home screen brings it's own issues. Take for example a home screen filled with edge to edge one row tall widgets. How do you resize that to fit into a horizontal orientation?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - MBCook 14y ago
    The Google Voice one makes sense to me. I don't have an Android phone, but the idea of having multiple texting apps that are slightly different seems amazingly confusing. The horizontal support was the only one that didn't seem like a problem to me. Most Apple apps on iOS have horizontal support (Messages, Calendar, Camera, Photos, Mail, Stocks, Calculator, Notes, Safari, Reminders, Contacts). But Springboard (the launcher) doesn't have horizontal support. That doesn't seem like a loss to me. If there was a second horizontal orientation, I've have to re-organize everything. You can't rotate every icon 90 degrees because there isn't enough space for the app titles in landscape. A few other apps lack a landscape mode, but it doesn't seem like a big deal. Settings, App Store, Weather, and YouTube (outside of video playback) don't support it, but that doesn't seem like a big limitation.
    - cdawzrd 14y ago
      Google Voice doesn't come stock with Android. You can install it if you have a Google Voice account. If so, you probably know which one you want to use for texting. For example, I'm on Sprint and have GV integration enabled, which means my GV number gets used for caller ID and voicemail instead of my Sprint number. If I use the stock messaging app (or any other like Handcent), the texts go out as SMS through Sprint, with my Sprint number. If I use the GV app, the texts go out using the internet (3G or Wifi) and have my GV number. I never use the built-in messaging app. I'm pretty sure anyone who installs GV understands the concepts behind it and chooses to use either GV or SMS for text messaging without any confusion.
CamperBob2 14y ago
I'd say my biggest complaint with Android is excessive use of cryptic icons with no way to tell what they do until I press them. I'm pretty sure I forwarded some spam to some fairly important people the first time I tried to use Google Plus on my Galaxy Nexus. I still have no idea what I did, because I can't read hieroglyphics. I don't have time to look for documentation or tutorials that probably don't exist anyway, so I'm basically afraid to explore the app any further. An app that instantly and irreversibly alters the state of a remote process is not a good place to rely on discoverability, no matter if it's for social networking or nuclear reaction control. In general, things that are supposed to be "intuitive" need to be spelled out for the benefit of us slow folk to a greater extent than the designers at Google believe.
- Ineffable 14y ago
  Pro tip: Click and hold any icon in a top or bottom action bar in Android to see its label. Very useful with cryptic symbols. Not a solution, but eases the issue.
  - bsphil 14y ago
    Holy shit. That's handy to know.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Doesn't work in Browser, the #1 androd app. Holding on the tab switch button or the three dots menu button does nothing. Holding Back opens the history menu, holding the app switcher does nothing, holding home runs the Google Now animation. Better luck in other apps maybe.
  - platz 14y ago
    Thanks for the tip!
  - laserDinosaur 14y ago
    I wish I had of known this a year ago.
- mayneack 14y ago
daleharvey 14y ago
The back button gets picked on a lot, and it is confusing. However I am much happier having a consistently placed back button that works 90% of the time than not have one at all. When using iOS I constantly run into very common and simple workflows like read email, check a link in email, press back to get back to email which quickly become fustrating especially when apps have incredibly wierd workarounds (like twitter embedding a terrible web browser to check links), even simple things like deactivating the keyboard / going back from dialogs and activities.
- catch23 14y ago
  I use the 4 finger up-swipe for switching apps on the ipad, not sure if that exists on the iphone. My phone is an android and I've found it consistently faster to just go home than using the damned back button.
  - zevyoura 14y ago
    The 4 finger gesture doesn't work, but you can double tap the home button to do the same thing (on iPad too; that's how I do it because I don't like the 4 finger gestures).
    - bishnu 14y ago
      The double-tap home menu always brings up the weirdest menu. There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to how the apps are arranged (or if you even get apps - sometimes you get iPod controls). One of the more irritating features of iOS.
      - zevyoura 14y ago
        They're arranged in order of last used; swipe left to bring up another screen's worth. Swiping right brings up music controls. It's pretty straightforward, and in my opinion incredibly useful.
      - ulyssesgrant 14y ago
corporalagumbo 14y ago
Great write-up. I'd love to do/see something similar for WP7.5 - if only it had screenshot support.
- wluu 14y ago
  Guess we'll have to wait til WP8, which has native screenshot support. According to this Nokia wiki entry, there's a way to get (unofficial) screenshots to work in WP 7.5 if you have a device which is dev & interop unlocked - http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/How_to_take_screenshot_on_Windows_Phone http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/How_to_take_sc...
jpxxx 14y ago
Every time I pick up an Android based phone it's always the same miserable first five minutes. "Where are the apps? Is... Oh. Are these all of the apps or some of the apps? Where are all of the apps? Do I hit a button? Oh.. Oh, there's a browser. But why is it where it... do I drag this or something?" "How do I stop making it putting squares on the faces in the pictures? Why would you do this? Is it in the Settings? Where is the settings? Is there one settings app? Is it in a menu? Do I tap something? Is it one of these hardware butto-OH where am I now?" "How do I get this keyboard to go away? It shouldn't be up anymore. I hit enter. Didn't I? What the hell is this key with the arrow? Wait, is this "dismiss?" No.. do I touch the screen? Gotdamnit don't hit that I didn't want to hit that." Even on a Galaxy S3 last week, it was the same experience. There's too much Old World UI in Android for my tastes.
- Tichy 14y ago
  Wouldn't it be normal to learn those things after the first time? I think you are exaggerating a bit.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Seriously, are you kidding us?
- untog 14y ago
  You appear to be battling the highly technical concept of "familiarity". Anyone using an Android device for longer than a day has none of these issues, and someone that has never used an iOS device would have the same issues. For example: "Where are the apps? Is... Oh. Are these all of the apps or some of the apps? Where are all of the apps? Do I hit a button? Oh.. Oh, I swipe from side to side. Oh, but some of them are inside folders? What's going on when I go too far left?" I could go on, but really, what's the point?
  - jpxxx 14y ago
    shrug Your indignance over my experiences won't change anything from where I'm sitting. From a no-name candybar running 1.6 to a dead latest Galaxy S3 running 4.0, I have had the same miserable first five minutes. I've watched a Google marketing executive thrash around on 3.0 before having to wade in on his behalf, I've finished whatever e-mail setup the Verizon rep didn't do a dozen times, and I've spent nice long chunks of my time trying to troubleshoot issues, set up MDM, and fix sync drama of whatever type. I've spent tens upon tens of hours doing my due diligence. But every time I pick up the device, it's the same five minutes. Whatever manufacturer, whatever device, whatever form factor, whatever. Edit: Here's another way of putting it. When I pick up an "Android" device, I don't know what I'm getting. Stock? Cyanogen? Sense? Touchwiz? Motoblur? No-Name? No-name without OHA support? Carrier modifications? Manufacturer pre-loads? 1.x? 2.x? 3.x? 4.x? This makes answering remarkably simple questions like "how do I set up e-mail" pretty difficult, because there are so many possible answers to that question (K-9? Mail? Maildroid? Gmail? Forward mail to Gmail?) -and- the ones that come before it like "how do I get to the apps" and "how do I unlock the phone" and "what button, if any, wakes the phone up". These thousand distinctions without a difference make it hard to make predictions, design workflows, or make recommendations to anyone about anything Android. It's just this ever-expanding morass of STUFF.
mikecane 14y ago
Isn't Duarte -- formerly of Palm and webOS -- supposed to be the UI Dictator over at Google? So how does this stuff happen?
- mingramjr 14y ago
  Because the man is not perfect. Since his arrival Android has looked much better.
- Daishiman 14y ago
  Duarte replied at the end of the article.
barrkel 14y ago
I can stand these pretty easily :) The back button annoys me most in email apps - I think it's the stock Email app - when you scroll through all your unread email, and instead of doing an "up", it decides to go back through all the messages your just read. Meanwhile, it upsets me in other apps where, when I open a file from a file browser, and press back, it doesn't take me back to the file browser; it takes me "up" in the application that opened the file. So this is the heart of the inconsistency. Sometimes I want up, and sometimes I want back. It's context and app dependent. I don't really see a way to do it right without letting apps fiddle with the stack. Re icon size difference: I actually find this difference helpful in distinguishing one icon from another. On iOS, most icons are rounded squares, and are less visually distinctive. I had to go completely overboard with classification folders to make it easier for me to find stuff on my iPad. A lot of the other points are QA polish. I don't disagree with many of them, but they don't really bother me either. On the multiplicity of messaging apps, I don't really see that as a problem either, since I don't use any of the Google ones apart from the SMS app when I'm forced to; I use WhatsApp instead (yes, insecurity, I know).
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  > "I don't really see a way to do it right without letting apps fiddle with the stack." Apps can (and often do) fiddle with the stack, at least as it applies to their own Activities. Of course, they do so inconsistently (even Google's own apps do so inconsistently). In any case, Google clearly recognizes the issues with the back button and have been trying to fix it (see, eg: http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html ), but their attempts to fix it have also been clumsy. For example what they call the "up button" (both in the API and in their designer docs) visually looks like a back button. Trying to distinguish between "back" and "up" is great, but then making your "up" button look exactly what any sane person would expect a "back" button to look like is goofy. Not only is this confusing for users, but it is also confusing for developers, resulting in different apps handling the situation differently even though the app developers have tried to do what they think the right thing is. So the solution is in many ways more confusing than the situation before they tried to fix it.
sirn 14y ago
This is not exactly Jelly Bean's problem but it's one thing I can't stand. When you quickly scroll page and stop it using single tap, if that tap happens to fall onto tappable element (e.g. links), the element will be tapped. Both stock browser and Chrome has this behavior (which is extremely annoying). Other thing is scroll bar, I can't understand why do all apps implements its own scrollbar. From my quick testing of stock apps in JB (CM10), Messages app has one, Email app has one and contact list has another one.
jaredcwhite 14y ago
It's easy to nitpick little quirks in a platform's interface. iOS isn't quirk-free. I think a much larger problem is something this article only occasionally hints at (for example in the icon sizes section): Android's design aesthetic still sucks! Is it skeu-oriented like iOS? Not often but sometimes yes! Is it completely 2D minimalist like Metro-style? No, but sometimes yes. Is it futuristic/robot/Matrix? Yes, sometimes, but not always. Jelly Bean (and ICS) certainly improve upon past versions, but the UI still looks like a big mishmash compiled from random submissions from a bunch of volunteer open-source designers. Nothing wrong with that in theory and no offense to volunteer open-source contributors, but we're talking about Google here and their flagship platform. I can forgive spit and polish when I check out Haiku OS or the latest bleeding-edge KDE distro, but Google and the companies commercially shipping Android devices should be held to a much higher standard. Laugh all you want about Apple shredding pixels in Passport in iOS6 but at least they're putting huge resources into crafting memorable experiences that delight users. What's delightful, memorable -- even whimsical -- about Android?
sswezey 14y ago
One I just noticed with the NS4G: there is no documentation on how to get to Google Now, they talk about the Galaxy Nexus, but never mention its predecessor. How do you get to it? The search button... swiping up does not work whatsoever. And I HATE how my contacts are white and everything else is a dark grey to black theme.
- Shooti 14y ago
  FWIW, they spell it out for "Devices with a hardware search key" in the official changelog: http://www.android.com/about/jelly-bean/ http://www.android.com/about/jelly-bean/
  - mikeevans 14y ago
    Can also just hit the Google search bar at the top of every home screen.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Feature. gNow is a useless CPU/network waster.
- switch007 14y ago
  I hated the change of the search button. It used to launch the in-application search instead of google now. I'm still not used to it, month later.
emehrkay 14y ago
As an ios user since 08, the nexus7 needs a lot of comparative polish. * The keyboard doesnt always pop up when you're in a text field. * What's the deal with font rendering in Chrome? Some links appear bigger than others (on hackernews and reddit). * Hitting an actual link is like choosing a first square in Minesweeper, sometimes it works, but most of the time it either misfires or opens the enlarge modal. * There seems to be inconsistent feedback that a link was actually tapped in Chrome. * The built-in apps lack any real contrast. * The default google apps only seem to play content from the play store. I cant get the book reader to open anything so I had to try 10 different ebook readers leaving me in a situation of read some here, read some there. Why wouldnt google want it to open epub like ibooks does? * The software home button is very frustrating. Miss the spacebar, Im going to the home screen * Who thought that power + volume down is the best way to take a screenshot? It is very hard to do There are other little things that escape me at the moment. The device is great though, and if I didnt have such a history with ios, id probably think it was the best that could be offered. Luckily for us the gripes that I have seem to be minor in the grad scheme of things. My main advice (to you googlers reading) would be to choose a default setup that is what you guys consider the best of the best and still let the tweekers tweak. Oh and I feel that a small ipad would easily eat the nexus7's lunch
- nitrogen 14y ago
  Who thought that power + volume down is the best way to take a screenshot? It is very hard to do On a lot of phones, those two buttons are across from each other, so squeezing the phone with two fingers will take a screenshot if those phones support that shortcut.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    On flagship phones that is a two handed operation.
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      Not on my Galaxy Nexus, I just tried it.
HyprMusic 14y ago
You all dismiss these as things as minor annoyances, but you're missing the main point. It's these details that separate a brilliant user experience from a poor one. Apply may have less features, and it may be less flexible. But it provides a nicer experience, because of these kind of levels of details. You pick it up and it works, it really does feel like magic. I use both, and whilst my Android is considerably more powerful and has tonnes more features, the iPhone is just a pleasure to use (and I'm a Apple hating Google fanboy, so this pains me).
- enjo 14y ago
  It's funny, I have the exact opposite impression. I loathe picking up my iPad. I get into the browser and open a youtube video. How do I get back to the browser? Go all the way back home and hunt down the icon? Seriously? I want to just check something real quick, I'll just pull up my home screen and...crap... I have to actually hunt down an app? For real? I just want to see <whatever>! The navigation model in iOS, to me, is just broken. I think it's a polished experience no doubt. I think it's snappy and smooth. I just don't find it very delightful. It's work to me. My Jellybean Nexus, on the other hand just makes sense. It flows, it puts information where I want it, and does it all in a pretty seamless way. I'm rarely lost. For me I prefer the Android experience on it's own merits.
  - msbarnett 14y ago
    Double-tap home. That last app you were in is the left most in the list. You shouldn't be hunting for anything, ever.
    - tomflack 14y ago
      To add to this, four finger swipe up for the multitasking bar or four finger swipe to the left/right to flip between apps. It's not discoverable - as far as I know there isn't even a tutorial - but this is how large-screen devices work best.
  - catch23 14y ago
    ipad owner here -- you can use the 4 finger swipe for quickly switching apps. It's Apple's equivalent of a back button. It's also intuitive since you can see both apps as you are "dragging" the app back. You can also swipe up to get the equivalent of the double tap home button.
jsz0 14y ago
My single biggest annoyance is the last of support for calendar invites. Android just doesn't know what to do with them. I have to save them, open a file manager, view them in a text editor, manually create calendar events. Things like that are why I still reach for the nearest iOS device whenever possible. I'm still not thrilled at the speed and smoothness of web browsing on Android either. On a Galaxy Nexus with either 4.0 or 4.1 zooming and scrolling often lags. Finally will they ever update the IMAP/POP client? No message threading? Not everyone uses GMail.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Sadly, gmail embraced, extended and extinguished mail. K9 Mail is the unofficial community fork.
bsphil 14y ago
Spent a lot of time nitpicking small issues, but he does pick it up with better points after the back button rant and latitude. The horrendous lack of support for landscape views, G+ photos being stuck in my gallery (with a Picasa icon on top of it), soft button rotation, crappy contact pictures, and the 4 separate text messaging systems from Google. Good list overall, I hope the next update (Kringle?) tries to enforce more uniformity in the UI and in Google Apps particularly.
- mikeevans 14y ago
  Luckily, some of the complaints can be fixed with individual app updates, rather than waiting for an entire OS update.
- Evbn 14y ago
  You can turn off photo sync in settings.
notJim 14y ago
I have both a "new iPad" and an Android Phone (an HTC G2, which is stuck in Gingerbread and is not exactly in its prime.) I am a fairly simple user of both of these: I use a few apps (Twitter and Yelp come to mind, and an app to read reddit) and the stock apps (Google Maps especially on the phone, the browser on both.) Here is my perspective on the two: it doesn't actually matter that much. With iOS, everything looks pretty good and there's a lot of consistency. The browser, I understand, is much better than the browser on my phone (I'm not sure how it stacks up against Chrome for Android, which is not available to me.) But then, iOS is kind of annoying too: the keyboard placement often gets in the way of text fields, there is zero integration in between apps and no way for an app to provide a common service, I have to log in to everything separately. It's very difficult to move within a word (for example, if I typed fold instead of food, it is difficult to change the l to an o.) Every app has its own embedded web browser, which invariably has slight different controls than every other apps embedded web browser. Settings are sometimes bafflingly hidden in some other settings app, rather than being in the actual app you're using. Those things annoy me slightly, but they don't bother me that much when I'm using the device, because when I'm using the device, I'm focused on the task at hand and the device doesn't confuse me enough that it breaks my concentration. This is easy to understand because, as I mentioned, I do pretty simple things on my iPad. With Android, apps can provide common services ("Android intents") and they integrate well with one another. There's a back button to move between apps, so apps don't need to do things like embed their own web browser. There's a little nub that I can use to move within a word, so correcting text is much easier. I can use a custom keyboard that is better than both the iOS keyboard (which is admittedly very good), and better than the built-in Android keyboard (which is pretty good, but doesn't have very good autocorrect.) But the thing with Android is that up until recently, it's been very plain and even ugly by default. The default look of an app is pretty ugly (just white text on a black background) so developers seem to try to implement their own style, with varying degrees of success. When the back button works, it's a godsend, but when it doesn't it's really fucking confusing. Animations are often choppy. But mostly none of this actually matters that much, because when I'm using the device, I'm focused on the task at hand and the device doesn't confuse me enough that it breaks my concentration. This is easy to understand because, as I mentioned, I do pretty simple things on my Android device.
- 14y ago
lnanek2 14y ago
Interesting viewpoint. I know Google has said they did usability tests and found users didn't know what back would do a lot of the time and disliked it. Google's solution was to provide up navigation instead, which stays within the app. This is the < arrow at the top left of the standard action bar pattern now. I guess the original post had a point that back navigation could have been made more consistent as well, however.
vibrunazo 14y ago
Such a shame, this is such a good article. A respectful adult discussion of real problems. From which we could have a great conversation about these issues, and better, brainstorm solutions. Which would be an incredibly fun and productive thing to do. Even Matias Duarte himself replied to the article. After reading the article I clicked on the HN comments, excited, expecting to read insightful solutions I could never have came up with. But instead, 90% of the comments here on HN, including the top voted ones, are just childish attempts to show off how cool you are for cheer-leading for either iOS or Android more. This is so sad. This place is in desperate need of more moderation. The ratio of active users/mods seem out of control.
- davros 14y ago
  I've got a chrome extension called 'Hacker News Collapse'. With one click (on the parent comment spawning the low-quality discussion) I can hide the whole thread and move on to more interesting discussions.
  - efraim 14y ago
    Also available as a user script, not saying that this is the same author though. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037
- nollidge 14y ago
  However, now (14 hours after you posted this) it's mostly insightful stuff at the top. Perhaps you were too quick to judge.
mrbill 14y ago
My mother has an iPad1, an iPad 2, and an original Kindle Fire. She has no problems with any of them, but when I gave her a Samsung Focus Windows Phone last Christmas (I'd gotten it as a freebie) she tried to use it, and got frustrated with the UI to the point of wanting to throw it across the room. This was just doing something simple like editing a contact that was already on the phone. I ended up buying her a refurbished iPhone 3GS and she loves it to bits.
richardjordan 14y ago
Jelly Bean push to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus also led to a bunch of charging problems which I'm not the only one to have, yet still cannot find solutions to.
peterwwillis 14y ago
Do Google devs all work in silos? Is there any unified vision for how a 'product' should end up? Or is it just a race to push features into a general project plan and stamp a version on it?
jellicle 14y ago
For some reason no one has remarked on one of my biggest problems with Jelly Bean - that Google no longer lets you opt-out of being tracked. There are two location services, which used to be called coarse (uses names of nearby Wifi networks and such) and fine (GPS). Google now won't let you use coarse without also opting in to having your location sent to Google at all times, whether you are using any application or not. So, for example, Google Maps doesn't work unless you opt in to being tracked at all times. Google Now doesn't work at all unless you opt-in to being tracked at all times. Etc. In prior versions of Android, being tracked 24/7/365 was a separate checkbox you could opt out of while retaining full location functionality when you desired it, e.g. for Google Maps. No longer. No one in the press seems to have picked up on this unadvertised feature change of Jelly Bean.
- guelo 14y ago
  I'm not sure if you're right about this change but it doesn't really matter. Cops are all over location data from cell towers, the phone companies don't even require subpoenas to give them access to it. And there's absolutely no way to opt out of it except by not using a cell phone.
- gareim 14y ago
  Are you sure? I was under the impression (CM10 on SIII) that you could opt out of wifi based location services and choose to only use GPS satellites for GMaps.
- tresta 14y ago
  It's not like that on my Nexus 7. I can choose only to use the GPS in the Location services settings, or I can choose to use "Google's location service", which sends information to google.
tehaugmenter 14y ago
I can't stand reading this guy's article. I've been an Android user for 3+ years. The functionality of the back button just comes natural to me at this point. The back button has always moved from an inner screen of an app back to the main app screen. It's ALWAYS done that. If they were to "fix" it for people who can't figure that out, they'd piss of every day android users. Scenario: Text message received, using a web browser currently. Bob says: "Hey did you remember to ask Joe about that thing?". What is your next move? You respond to Bob, and you hit _BACK_, scroll to Joe's thread, and ask Joe about that thing. This is intended functionality. Translating that into a manual friendly context is not really that easy. The majority of people these days don't even read manuals. If you can't figure it out, then get an iOS device. I feel like the back button is pretty straight forward (irony).
electic 14y ago
I had a Jelly Bean phone and finally got rid of it because of this back button issue. Hate to say it, Apple might not have all the features under the sun, all the buttons, all the noises, all the icons, all the knobs, but whatever they have is done right and at the end of the day, that is what matters.
ljf 14y ago
One pet peeve of mine is when you set up a new Android phone. I've only done this once, but from Google Play it's pretty easy to find all the apps you've installed before. But after clicking one and installing it, you return to the app list at the top. I know they meantion a different use case in the article, but this literally turns what should be a quick and pleasent task of getting your new phone going, into a killer. Maybe there is a better way of doing it, from their website? Whatever they should make it easier and clearer.
CWIZO 14y ago
Gmail on Android is especially bad when it comes to the back button: 1) you are in some app 2) a new email arrives and you open it trough the notification bar 3) you read the email and do whatever with it 4) hit back and you are staring at the home screen. Arghhh this one is driving me insane.
ZoFreX 14y ago
A couple of notes: * I think the inconsistent application switcher icon / app title display issue is due to intents. If you click an image in your GMail it uses the Gallery to display it, but you are still in the GMail app. At a technical level I understand what's going on but I think it either needs to make it clearer what's really going on (for example have the GMail title bar above the image, and have the intent embedded like an iFrame, as well as fixing the icon/screenshot issue), or spawn a new application to handle it (which, if the back button behaves as per the spec in that application, would be totally transparent to the user). Both of these approaches are similar to existing solutions in the desktop world so I think the familiarity would defuse the confusion. * Icons - I like that the icons are all over the place, in style, size, shape etc. It's a common criticism from an aesthetic perspective, which I agree with, but from a usability perspective it makes it a hell of a lot easier to pick out my apps. I used to use Go Launcher with a theme to make everything a bit more iOS-like and one of the things it did was make all icons the same outline and size by generating coloured backgrounds on them. Obviously, this is far lower quality than actually having uniform icons designed by humans, but I found the lack of silhouette and size variation made them blur together more. * Horizontal support - I don't know why, but some apps don't change based on the tilt sensor, and some do. My old Motorola had a dock and when I put it into it, it forced everything including the homescreen into landscape mode. If you have a custom launcher they usually have options to control whether or not the homescreen & launcher will go into horizontal mode or not, and on both devices I've tried this, if you allow the homescreen to go into horizontal mode everything else follows - including the dialler. This is the only point in the article that I would say is definitively incorrect.
RivieraKid 14y ago
Also icons in Action Bar don't have labels. The label appears after long-pressing the icon but vthe ast majority of users doesn't know this.
ZeroGravitas 14y ago
Most of these are valid, but he undermines his own case with some of them e.g. icons being the same size. That's a valid issue, but the Android guidelines are correct that using every pixel of height would look uneven. It is the same issue with capital letters, A should generally be taller than T so that they visually look equal in height. Dismissing this as "just eyeballing it" is favoring OCD-style logical consistency over actual user interface consistency, since icons with the same pixel height can look inconsistent to users. Time for two of my favourite quotes "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", and "different isn't always better, but better is always different" and to note that this is the kind of article that Gruber used to write about OS X when Apple were rapidly evolving it in it's early days[1]. It seemed to me even then that it didn't recognize the tension between improving what's broken and keeping everything consistent. [1]: http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal
schme 14y ago
One thing that has been bugging me in ICS and JB is how small textfields behave, especially in text-messages. I tend to write long sms's and occasionally want to change a word from the middle. The 'knob' the author mentions does a good job if I want to get back to the beginning, but I haven't found a way to scroll back to the middle with it. Rolling the typefield itself helps, but after doing that the knob is still very prone to getting me straight back to the beginning/end. Navigation in textfields feels awkward. If I'm scolding the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, do tell, I'd like to hear if it's just me or does someone else feel the same.
89a 14y ago
This OS is such a joke
dlikhten 14y ago
FWIW: In iOS, all icons are varying size, just they have that little border around it forcing all sizes to feel identical. Its a good trick. BTW He forgot to mention: Why is it that on every fucking device out there the back button and menu button are placed in different locations? Like samsung = right, htc = left, google = left, samsung's evil twin = in the middle of the screen.
laserDinosaur 14y ago
My biggest gripe? The fact that they got rid of square menu boxes with icons for long thin rectangular labels. Try mashing "Dismiss" on your alarm at 5am when you need to hit a little thin bar on the screen. "Snooze" you pressed? NO! I meant to hit Dismiss! I understand that some menus now have too many options to fit into a grid of boxes, but it would be nice to have boxes for <5 options and rectangle labels for >5.

310 points by e1ven 14y ago

As an avid iOS user, every time I try and pick up an Android I experience the same types of issues. I wonder whether it actually is a lack of intuition, or that I am so locked into the iOS way that it ends up feeling foreign right from the start. Re: the back button, I am curious how other mobile OSs handle this problem. An obvious solution would be that the OS forces a particular behaviour, but then again, you were referencing default apps with varying implementations. Having never worked with the Android SDK, I wonder if the behaviour is forced on 3rd party apps?

polshaw 14y ago
>same types of issues Elaborate please? The only common UX issue i can see here is the back button, most are aesthetic.
akjetma 14y ago
As a person who's never had an iPhone/Mac, I experience the same foreign feeling when I use an iOS device. I'm pretty sure this feeling is mostly due to unfamiliarity and not superior design on either side. Although it is worth noting that whenever I've borrowed someone else's Android phone it can be a completely different experience from my own Android device, whereas an iOS user borrowing an iOS device will know exactly how to operate it.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  Yep, I especially get this feeling when using a Mac, from the mouse acceleration curve. It just feels wrong, and I can only use a Mac for a few minutes before my hand starts hurting.
contextfree 14y ago
"I wonder whether it actually is a lack of intuition, or that I am so locked into the iOS way that it ends up feeling foreign right from the start." Intuitive means familiar, so the answer is "yes"
- roryreiff 14y ago
  To elaborate... What informs my thought process as to what I believe will happen when using the interface? Do I think it will behave a certain way because it seems to make the most sense, or because I remember the iOS implementation? Since it's probably fair to assume that my understanding of any UI is going to be derived from some other previously used UI, perhaps the question is a pointless one? I am not sure what the answer is.
ajross 14y ago
This is true of every major platform UX change. Everyone hates all platforms except the one they use, except for those rare conversion events where something trips in your brain and you decide to switch. Then you hate what you used to use and everything returns to normal.
georgemcbay 14y ago
" I wonder whether it actually is a lack of intuition, or that I am so locked into the iOS way that it ends up feeling foreign right from the start" Both, but mostly the latter. If you use both OSes regularly each becomes pretty natural to use. But there are some baffling things in Android that are just too vaguely defined, like the oft-mentioned-here back button. I use Android every day, and I'm still not 100% sure what the backbutton is going to do when I press it, even in apps I use pretty often. Unfortunately fixing this now isn't that easy because each app's Activities gets to choose what happens when the back button is pressed. This is bad for the obvious reason that some developers are bound to do the wrong thing, but made worse by the fact that Google themselves have attempted to "redefine" the back button various times and each attempt has made things more confusing (IMO).

j_baker 14y ago

The back button issue for me is the biggest one. The back button is such a useful thing to have, but the inconsistency of its behavior is sometimes mind-boggling.

FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
I think Android is great, but this inconsistency is what spoils it. I still get tripped up when I click the back button in the browser, and it boots me back to the home screen and not the previous item in my browser history. Never mind having the concept of 'windows' with zero visual cue that a page loaded in a new window, and not the existing one. There wouldn't be much of a problem but the stock apps set expectations that are rarely delivered upon anywhere else. You're trained to long-press an item to perform an action on that specific item. This won't work in every app: in some caes you might have to swipe it, iPhone style; in others, it's just not possible. I would still use Android over an iPhone, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
perishabledave 14y ago
Agreed. I constantly get confused when using the play store. If I navigate to an app detail view, do I press the back button or the top left navigation button to get back to the list? Shouldn't it be intuitive enough for me to know without having to memorize its behavior?

guelo 14y ago

The back button in previous Androids was mostly fine with a few overloaded functions that led to some understandable inconsistencies. It might get stuck going backwards in the browser or it might dismiss a dialog or keyboard instead of going to the previous screen, but the annoyances were minor. To fix this they inexplicably added a second iOS-style header back button (which is called Up even though it is normally shown with a left pointer). The combination of two back buttons and the difficulty of understanding it, even for developers who have read the long style guide[1], is an absolutely baffling design decision. There is no way that users can intuitively learn what these buttons do. Add the inconsistent implementations and it's a usability nightmare. [1] http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html

gbog 14y ago
It is not two back buttons. It is like a browser: a history back button at browser level, and a suggested top left clickable app icon that usually brings you to app main screen, or some intermediary hub screen if the app is really multiple apps bundled in one. It's true that it can be confusing at times but the reason is that of inconsistencies and some bad behavior of some apps, eg hooking the back button. Don't think people are that stupid, they can understand such a simple model.
- fireflash38 14y ago
  It becomes frustrating when the activity stack is invisible, but still accumulating additional activities in app. Old Gmail was especially egregious with this, where you could hit the back button 10+ times and end up switching between emails you've viewed days previously before you actually back out of the app. I love the general idea of the separate Up and Back, but I'd compare it to XP-era Windows explorer rather than a browser (though both are valid comparisons, I just think Explorer is closer). It just runs into issues where the developers have to try to divine what exactly you are wanting to do at each instance when you hit back. Sometimes users want to go back to where they were before when they hit back, sometimes they want to go 'back' to the home screen of an app - this is what the 'Up' navigation button should exist as, but seldom does. What about if you go Up in app, then hit the back button? Should you exit out of the app? Go back to where you were in app? Go back to the previous app? All are valid cases. It really does all come down to consistency.

mikeevans 14y ago

My main disagreement with these is regarding Google Voice. >If this is a texting app, why is it called "Voice"? Because it's not just a texting app. It does voicemail and "makes calls" as well. Otherwise, most of his other complaints are valid and inconsistent.

rtkwe 14y ago
That and the horizontal complaint are the ones I don't really get. Horizontal doesn't really make sense as a horizontal orientation. And orientation changes with widgets on the home screen brings it's own issues. Take for example a home screen filled with edge to edge one row tall widgets. How do you resize that to fit into a horizontal orientation?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- MBCook 14y ago
  The Google Voice one makes sense to me. I don't have an Android phone, but the idea of having multiple texting apps that are slightly different seems amazingly confusing. The horizontal support was the only one that didn't seem like a problem to me. Most Apple apps on iOS have horizontal support (Messages, Calendar, Camera, Photos, Mail, Stocks, Calculator, Notes, Safari, Reminders, Contacts). But Springboard (the launcher) doesn't have horizontal support. That doesn't seem like a loss to me. If there was a second horizontal orientation, I've have to re-organize everything. You can't rotate every icon 90 degrees because there isn't enough space for the app titles in landscape. A few other apps lack a landscape mode, but it doesn't seem like a big deal. Settings, App Store, Weather, and YouTube (outside of video playback) don't support it, but that doesn't seem like a big limitation.
  - cdawzrd 14y ago
    Google Voice doesn't come stock with Android. You can install it if you have a Google Voice account. If so, you probably know which one you want to use for texting. For example, I'm on Sprint and have GV integration enabled, which means my GV number gets used for caller ID and voicemail instead of my Sprint number. If I use the stock messaging app (or any other like Handcent), the texts go out as SMS through Sprint, with my Sprint number. If I use the GV app, the texts go out using the internet (3G or Wifi) and have my GV number. I never use the built-in messaging app. I'm pretty sure anyone who installs GV understands the concepts behind it and chooses to use either GV or SMS for text messaging without any confusion.

CamperBob2 14y ago

I'd say my biggest complaint with Android is excessive use of cryptic icons with no way to tell what they do until I press them. I'm pretty sure I forwarded some spam to some fairly important people the first time I tried to use Google Plus on my Galaxy Nexus. I still have no idea what I did, because I can't read hieroglyphics. I don't have time to look for documentation or tutorials that probably don't exist anyway, so I'm basically afraid to explore the app any further. An app that instantly and irreversibly alters the state of a remote process is not a good place to rely on discoverability, no matter if it's for social networking or nuclear reaction control. In general, things that are supposed to be "intuitive" need to be spelled out for the benefit of us slow folk to a greater extent than the designers at Google believe.

Ineffable 14y ago
Pro tip: Click and hold any icon in a top or bottom action bar in Android to see its label. Very useful with cryptic symbols. Not a solution, but eases the issue.
- bsphil 14y ago
  Holy shit. That's handy to know.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Doesn't work in Browser, the #1 androd app. Holding on the tab switch button or the three dots menu button does nothing. Holding Back opens the history menu, holding the app switcher does nothing, holding home runs the Google Now animation. Better luck in other apps maybe.
- platz 14y ago
  Thanks for the tip!
- laserDinosaur 14y ago
  I wish I had of known this a year ago.
mayneack 14y ago

daleharvey 14y ago

The back button gets picked on a lot, and it is confusing. However I am much happier having a consistently placed back button that works 90% of the time than not have one at all. When using iOS I constantly run into very common and simple workflows like read email, check a link in email, press back to get back to email which quickly become fustrating especially when apps have incredibly wierd workarounds (like twitter embedding a terrible web browser to check links), even simple things like deactivating the keyboard / going back from dialogs and activities.

catch23 14y ago
I use the 4 finger up-swipe for switching apps on the ipad, not sure if that exists on the iphone. My phone is an android and I've found it consistently faster to just go home than using the damned back button.
- zevyoura 14y ago
  The 4 finger gesture doesn't work, but you can double tap the home button to do the same thing (on iPad too; that's how I do it because I don't like the 4 finger gestures).
  - bishnu 14y ago
    The double-tap home menu always brings up the weirdest menu. There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to how the apps are arranged (or if you even get apps - sometimes you get iPod controls). One of the more irritating features of iOS.
    - zevyoura 14y ago
      They're arranged in order of last used; swipe left to bring up another screen's worth. Swiping right brings up music controls. It's pretty straightforward, and in my opinion incredibly useful.
    - ulyssesgrant 14y ago

corporalagumbo 14y ago

Great write-up. I'd love to do/see something similar for WP7.5 - if only it had screenshot support.

wluu 14y ago
Guess we'll have to wait til WP8, which has native screenshot support. According to this Nokia wiki entry, there's a way to get (unofficial) screenshots to work in WP 7.5 if you have a device which is dev & interop unlocked - http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/How_to_take_screenshot_on_Windows_Phone http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/How_to_take_sc...

jpxxx 14y ago

Every time I pick up an Android based phone it's always the same miserable first five minutes. "Where are the apps? Is... Oh. Are these all of the apps or some of the apps? Where are all of the apps? Do I hit a button? Oh.. Oh, there's a browser. But why is it where it... do I drag this or something?" "How do I stop making it putting squares on the faces in the pictures? Why would you do this? Is it in the Settings? Where is the settings? Is there one settings app? Is it in a menu? Do I tap something? Is it one of these hardware butto-OH where am I now?" "How do I get this keyboard to go away? It shouldn't be up anymore. I hit enter. Didn't I? What the hell is this key with the arrow? Wait, is this "dismiss?" No.. do I touch the screen? Gotdamnit don't hit that I didn't want to hit that." Even on a Galaxy S3 last week, it was the same experience. There's too much Old World UI in Android for my tastes.

Tichy 14y ago
Wouldn't it be normal to learn those things after the first time? I think you are exaggerating a bit.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Seriously, are you kidding us?
untog 14y ago
You appear to be battling the highly technical concept of "familiarity". Anyone using an Android device for longer than a day has none of these issues, and someone that has never used an iOS device would have the same issues. For example: "Where are the apps? Is... Oh. Are these all of the apps or some of the apps? Where are all of the apps? Do I hit a button? Oh.. Oh, I swipe from side to side. Oh, but some of them are inside folders? What's going on when I go too far left?" I could go on, but really, what's the point?
- jpxxx 14y ago
  shrug Your indignance over my experiences won't change anything from where I'm sitting. From a no-name candybar running 1.6 to a dead latest Galaxy S3 running 4.0, I have had the same miserable first five minutes. I've watched a Google marketing executive thrash around on 3.0 before having to wade in on his behalf, I've finished whatever e-mail setup the Verizon rep didn't do a dozen times, and I've spent nice long chunks of my time trying to troubleshoot issues, set up MDM, and fix sync drama of whatever type. I've spent tens upon tens of hours doing my due diligence. But every time I pick up the device, it's the same five minutes. Whatever manufacturer, whatever device, whatever form factor, whatever. Edit: Here's another way of putting it. When I pick up an "Android" device, I don't know what I'm getting. Stock? Cyanogen? Sense? Touchwiz? Motoblur? No-Name? No-name without OHA support? Carrier modifications? Manufacturer pre-loads? 1.x? 2.x? 3.x? 4.x? This makes answering remarkably simple questions like "how do I set up e-mail" pretty difficult, because there are so many possible answers to that question (K-9? Mail? Maildroid? Gmail? Forward mail to Gmail?) -and- the ones that come before it like "how do I get to the apps" and "how do I unlock the phone" and "what button, if any, wakes the phone up". These thousand distinctions without a difference make it hard to make predictions, design workflows, or make recommendations to anyone about anything Android. It's just this ever-expanding morass of STUFF.

mikecane 14y ago

Isn't Duarte -- formerly of Palm and webOS -- supposed to be the UI Dictator over at Google? So how does this stuff happen?

mingramjr 14y ago
Because the man is not perfect. Since his arrival Android has looked much better.
Daishiman 14y ago
Duarte replied at the end of the article.

barrkel 14y ago

I can stand these pretty easily :) The back button annoys me most in email apps - I think it's the stock Email app - when you scroll through all your unread email, and instead of doing an "up", it decides to go back through all the messages your just read. Meanwhile, it upsets me in other apps where, when I open a file from a file browser, and press back, it doesn't take me back to the file browser; it takes me "up" in the application that opened the file. So this is the heart of the inconsistency. Sometimes I want up, and sometimes I want back. It's context and app dependent. I don't really see a way to do it right without letting apps fiddle with the stack. Re icon size difference: I actually find this difference helpful in distinguishing one icon from another. On iOS, most icons are rounded squares, and are less visually distinctive. I had to go completely overboard with classification folders to make it easier for me to find stuff on my iPad. A lot of the other points are QA polish. I don't disagree with many of them, but they don't really bother me either. On the multiplicity of messaging apps, I don't really see that as a problem either, since I don't use any of the Google ones apart from the SMS app when I'm forced to; I use WhatsApp instead (yes, insecurity, I know).

georgemcbay 14y ago
> "I don't really see a way to do it right without letting apps fiddle with the stack." Apps can (and often do) fiddle with the stack, at least as it applies to their own Activities. Of course, they do so inconsistently (even Google's own apps do so inconsistently). In any case, Google clearly recognizes the issues with the back button and have been trying to fix it (see, eg: http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html ), but their attempts to fix it have also been clumsy. For example what they call the "up button" (both in the API and in their designer docs) visually looks like a back button. Trying to distinguish between "back" and "up" is great, but then making your "up" button look exactly what any sane person would expect a "back" button to look like is goofy. Not only is this confusing for users, but it is also confusing for developers, resulting in different apps handling the situation differently even though the app developers have tried to do what they think the right thing is. So the solution is in many ways more confusing than the situation before they tried to fix it.

sirn 14y ago

This is not exactly Jelly Bean's problem but it's one thing I can't stand. When you quickly scroll page and stop it using single tap, if that tap happens to fall onto tappable element (e.g. links), the element will be tapped. Both stock browser and Chrome has this behavior (which is extremely annoying). Other thing is scroll bar, I can't understand why do all apps implements its own scrollbar. From my quick testing of stock apps in JB (CM10), Messages app has one, Email app has one and contact list has another one.

jaredcwhite 14y ago

It's easy to nitpick little quirks in a platform's interface. iOS isn't quirk-free. I think a much larger problem is something this article only occasionally hints at (for example in the icon sizes section): Android's design aesthetic still sucks! Is it skeu-oriented like iOS? Not often but sometimes yes! Is it completely 2D minimalist like Metro-style? No, but sometimes yes. Is it futuristic/robot/Matrix? Yes, sometimes, but not always. Jelly Bean (and ICS) certainly improve upon past versions, but the UI still looks like a big mishmash compiled from random submissions from a bunch of volunteer open-source designers. Nothing wrong with that in theory and no offense to volunteer open-source contributors, but we're talking about Google here and their flagship platform. I can forgive spit and polish when I check out Haiku OS or the latest bleeding-edge KDE distro, but Google and the companies commercially shipping Android devices should be held to a much higher standard. Laugh all you want about Apple shredding pixels in Passport in iOS6 but at least they're putting huge resources into crafting memorable experiences that delight users. What's delightful, memorable -- even whimsical -- about Android?

sswezey 14y ago

One I just noticed with the NS4G: there is no documentation on how to get to Google Now, they talk about the Galaxy Nexus, but never mention its predecessor. How do you get to it? The search button... swiping up does not work whatsoever. And I HATE how my contacts are white and everything else is a dark grey to black theme.

Shooti 14y ago
FWIW, they spell it out for "Devices with a hardware search key" in the official changelog: http://www.android.com/about/jelly-bean/ http://www.android.com/about/jelly-bean/
- mikeevans 14y ago
  Can also just hit the Google search bar at the top of every home screen.
Evbn 14y ago
Feature. gNow is a useless CPU/network waster.
switch007 14y ago
I hated the change of the search button. It used to launch the in-application search instead of google now. I'm still not used to it, month later.

emehrkay 14y ago

As an ios user since 08, the nexus7 needs a lot of comparative polish. * The keyboard doesnt always pop up when you're in a text field. * What's the deal with font rendering in Chrome? Some links appear bigger than others (on hackernews and reddit). * Hitting an actual link is like choosing a first square in Minesweeper, sometimes it works, but most of the time it either misfires or opens the enlarge modal. * There seems to be inconsistent feedback that a link was actually tapped in Chrome. * The built-in apps lack any real contrast. * The default google apps only seem to play content from the play store. I cant get the book reader to open anything so I had to try 10 different ebook readers leaving me in a situation of read some here, read some there. Why wouldnt google want it to open epub like ibooks does? * The software home button is very frustrating. Miss the spacebar, Im going to the home screen * Who thought that power + volume down is the best way to take a screenshot? It is very hard to do There are other little things that escape me at the moment. The device is great though, and if I didnt have such a history with ios, id probably think it was the best that could be offered. Luckily for us the gripes that I have seem to be minor in the grad scheme of things. My main advice (to you googlers reading) would be to choose a default setup that is what you guys consider the best of the best and still let the tweekers tweak. Oh and I feel that a small ipad would easily eat the nexus7's lunch

nitrogen 14y ago
Who thought that power + volume down is the best way to take a screenshot? It is very hard to do On a lot of phones, those two buttons are across from each other, so squeezing the phone with two fingers will take a screenshot if those phones support that shortcut.
- Evbn 14y ago
  On flagship phones that is a two handed operation.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    Not on my Galaxy Nexus, I just tried it.

HyprMusic 14y ago

You all dismiss these as things as minor annoyances, but you're missing the main point. It's these details that separate a brilliant user experience from a poor one. Apply may have less features, and it may be less flexible. But it provides a nicer experience, because of these kind of levels of details. You pick it up and it works, it really does feel like magic. I use both, and whilst my Android is considerably more powerful and has tonnes more features, the iPhone is just a pleasure to use (and I'm a Apple hating Google fanboy, so this pains me).

enjo 14y ago
It's funny, I have the exact opposite impression. I loathe picking up my iPad. I get into the browser and open a youtube video. How do I get back to the browser? Go all the way back home and hunt down the icon? Seriously? I want to just check something real quick, I'll just pull up my home screen and...crap... I have to actually hunt down an app? For real? I just want to see <whatever>! The navigation model in iOS, to me, is just broken. I think it's a polished experience no doubt. I think it's snappy and smooth. I just don't find it very delightful. It's work to me. My Jellybean Nexus, on the other hand just makes sense. It flows, it puts information where I want it, and does it all in a pretty seamless way. I'm rarely lost. For me I prefer the Android experience on it's own merits.
- msbarnett 14y ago
  Double-tap home. That last app you were in is the left most in the list. You shouldn't be hunting for anything, ever.
  - tomflack 14y ago
    To add to this, four finger swipe up for the multitasking bar or four finger swipe to the left/right to flip between apps. It's not discoverable - as far as I know there isn't even a tutorial - but this is how large-screen devices work best.
- catch23 14y ago
  ipad owner here -- you can use the 4 finger swipe for quickly switching apps. It's Apple's equivalent of a back button. It's also intuitive since you can see both apps as you are "dragging" the app back. You can also swipe up to get the equivalent of the double tap home button.

jsz0 14y ago

My single biggest annoyance is the last of support for calendar invites. Android just doesn't know what to do with them. I have to save them, open a file manager, view them in a text editor, manually create calendar events. Things like that are why I still reach for the nearest iOS device whenever possible. I'm still not thrilled at the speed and smoothness of web browsing on Android either. On a Galaxy Nexus with either 4.0 or 4.1 zooming and scrolling often lags. Finally will they ever update the IMAP/POP client? No message threading? Not everyone uses GMail.

Evbn 14y ago
Sadly, gmail embraced, extended and extinguished mail. K9 Mail is the unofficial community fork.

bsphil 14y ago

Spent a lot of time nitpicking small issues, but he does pick it up with better points after the back button rant and latitude. The horrendous lack of support for landscape views, G+ photos being stuck in my gallery (with a Picasa icon on top of it), soft button rotation, crappy contact pictures, and the 4 separate text messaging systems from Google. Good list overall, I hope the next update (Kringle?) tries to enforce more uniformity in the UI and in Google Apps particularly.

mikeevans 14y ago
Luckily, some of the complaints can be fixed with individual app updates, rather than waiting for an entire OS update.
Evbn 14y ago
You can turn off photo sync in settings.

notJim 14y ago

I have both a "new iPad" and an Android Phone (an HTC G2, which is stuck in Gingerbread and is not exactly in its prime.) I am a fairly simple user of both of these: I use a few apps (Twitter and Yelp come to mind, and an app to read reddit) and the stock apps (Google Maps especially on the phone, the browser on both.) Here is my perspective on the two: it doesn't actually matter that much. With iOS, everything looks pretty good and there's a lot of consistency. The browser, I understand, is much better than the browser on my phone (I'm not sure how it stacks up against Chrome for Android, which is not available to me.) But then, iOS is kind of annoying too: the keyboard placement often gets in the way of text fields, there is zero integration in between apps and no way for an app to provide a common service, I have to log in to everything separately. It's very difficult to move within a word (for example, if I typed fold instead of food, it is difficult to change the l to an o.) Every app has its own embedded web browser, which invariably has slight different controls than every other apps embedded web browser. Settings are sometimes bafflingly hidden in some other settings app, rather than being in the actual app you're using. Those things annoy me slightly, but they don't bother me that much when I'm using the device, because when I'm using the device, I'm focused on the task at hand and the device doesn't confuse me enough that it breaks my concentration. This is easy to understand because, as I mentioned, I do pretty simple things on my iPad. With Android, apps can provide common services ("Android intents") and they integrate well with one another. There's a back button to move between apps, so apps don't need to do things like embed their own web browser. There's a little nub that I can use to move within a word, so correcting text is much easier. I can use a custom keyboard that is better than both the iOS keyboard (which is admittedly very good), and better than the built-in Android keyboard (which is pretty good, but doesn't have very good autocorrect.) But the thing with Android is that up until recently, it's been very plain and even ugly by default. The default look of an app is pretty ugly (just white text on a black background) so developers seem to try to implement their own style, with varying degrees of success. When the back button works, it's a godsend, but when it doesn't it's really fucking confusing. Animations are often choppy. But mostly none of this actually matters that much, because when I'm using the device, I'm focused on the task at hand and the device doesn't confuse me enough that it breaks my concentration. This is easy to understand because, as I mentioned, I do pretty simple things on my Android device.

14y ago

lnanek2 14y ago

Interesting viewpoint. I know Google has said they did usability tests and found users didn't know what back would do a lot of the time and disliked it. Google's solution was to provide up navigation instead, which stays within the app. This is the < arrow at the top left of the standard action bar pattern now. I guess the original post had a point that back navigation could have been made more consistent as well, however.

vibrunazo 14y ago

Such a shame, this is such a good article. A respectful adult discussion of real problems. From which we could have a great conversation about these issues, and better, brainstorm solutions. Which would be an incredibly fun and productive thing to do. Even Matias Duarte himself replied to the article. After reading the article I clicked on the HN comments, excited, expecting to read insightful solutions I could never have came up with. But instead, 90% of the comments here on HN, including the top voted ones, are just childish attempts to show off how cool you are for cheer-leading for either iOS or Android more. This is so sad. This place is in desperate need of more moderation. The ratio of active users/mods seem out of control.

davros 14y ago
I've got a chrome extension called 'Hacker News Collapse'. With one click (on the parent comment spawning the low-quality discussion) I can hide the whole thread and move on to more interesting discussions.
- efraim 14y ago
  Also available as a user script, not saying that this is the same author though. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/138037
nollidge 14y ago
However, now (14 hours after you posted this) it's mostly insightful stuff at the top. Perhaps you were too quick to judge.

mrbill 14y ago

My mother has an iPad1, an iPad 2, and an original Kindle Fire. She has no problems with any of them, but when I gave her a Samsung Focus Windows Phone last Christmas (I'd gotten it as a freebie) she tried to use it, and got frustrated with the UI to the point of wanting to throw it across the room. This was just doing something simple like editing a contact that was already on the phone. I ended up buying her a refurbished iPhone 3GS and she loves it to bits.

richardjordan 14y ago

Jelly Bean push to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus also led to a bunch of charging problems which I'm not the only one to have, yet still cannot find solutions to.

peterwwillis 14y ago

Do Google devs all work in silos? Is there any unified vision for how a 'product' should end up? Or is it just a race to push features into a general project plan and stamp a version on it?

jellicle 14y ago

For some reason no one has remarked on one of my biggest problems with Jelly Bean - that Google no longer lets you opt-out of being tracked. There are two location services, which used to be called coarse (uses names of nearby Wifi networks and such) and fine (GPS). Google now won't let you use coarse without also opting in to having your location sent to Google at all times, whether you are using any application or not. So, for example, Google Maps doesn't work unless you opt in to being tracked at all times. Google Now doesn't work at all unless you opt-in to being tracked at all times. Etc. In prior versions of Android, being tracked 24/7/365 was a separate checkbox you could opt out of while retaining full location functionality when you desired it, e.g. for Google Maps. No longer. No one in the press seems to have picked up on this unadvertised feature change of Jelly Bean.

guelo 14y ago
I'm not sure if you're right about this change but it doesn't really matter. Cops are all over location data from cell towers, the phone companies don't even require subpoenas to give them access to it. And there's absolutely no way to opt out of it except by not using a cell phone.
gareim 14y ago
Are you sure? I was under the impression (CM10 on SIII) that you could opt out of wifi based location services and choose to only use GPS satellites for GMaps.
tresta 14y ago
It's not like that on my Nexus 7. I can choose only to use the GPS in the Location services settings, or I can choose to use "Google's location service", which sends information to google.

tehaugmenter 14y ago

I can't stand reading this guy's article. I've been an Android user for 3+ years. The functionality of the back button just comes natural to me at this point. The back button has always moved from an inner screen of an app back to the main app screen. It's ALWAYS done that. If they were to "fix" it for people who can't figure that out, they'd piss of every day android users. Scenario: Text message received, using a web browser currently. Bob says: "Hey did you remember to ask Joe about that thing?". What is your next move? You respond to Bob, and you hit _BACK_, scroll to Joe's thread, and ask Joe about that thing. This is intended functionality. Translating that into a manual friendly context is not really that easy. The majority of people these days don't even read manuals. If you can't figure it out, then get an iOS device. I feel like the back button is pretty straight forward (irony).

electic 14y ago

I had a Jelly Bean phone and finally got rid of it because of this back button issue. Hate to say it, Apple might not have all the features under the sun, all the buttons, all the noises, all the icons, all the knobs, but whatever they have is done right and at the end of the day, that is what matters.

ljf 14y ago

One pet peeve of mine is when you set up a new Android phone. I've only done this once, but from Google Play it's pretty easy to find all the apps you've installed before. But after clicking one and installing it, you return to the app list at the top. I know they meantion a different use case in the article, but this literally turns what should be a quick and pleasent task of getting your new phone going, into a killer. Maybe there is a better way of doing it, from their website? Whatever they should make it easier and clearer.

CWIZO 14y ago

Gmail on Android is especially bad when it comes to the back button: 1) you are in some app 2) a new email arrives and you open it trough the notification bar 3) you read the email and do whatever with it 4) hit back and you are staring at the home screen. Arghhh this one is driving me insane.

ZoFreX 14y ago

A couple of notes: * I think the inconsistent application switcher icon / app title display issue is due to intents. If you click an image in your GMail it uses the Gallery to display it, but you are still in the GMail app. At a technical level I understand what's going on but I think it either needs to make it clearer what's really going on (for example have the GMail title bar above the image, and have the intent embedded like an iFrame, as well as fixing the icon/screenshot issue), or spawn a new application to handle it (which, if the back button behaves as per the spec in that application, would be totally transparent to the user). Both of these approaches are similar to existing solutions in the desktop world so I think the familiarity would defuse the confusion. * Icons - I like that the icons are all over the place, in style, size, shape etc. It's a common criticism from an aesthetic perspective, which I agree with, but from a usability perspective it makes it a hell of a lot easier to pick out my apps. I used to use Go Launcher with a theme to make everything a bit more iOS-like and one of the things it did was make all icons the same outline and size by generating coloured backgrounds on them. Obviously, this is far lower quality than actually having uniform icons designed by humans, but I found the lack of silhouette and size variation made them blur together more. * Horizontal support - I don't know why, but some apps don't change based on the tilt sensor, and some do. My old Motorola had a dock and when I put it into it, it forced everything including the homescreen into landscape mode. If you have a custom launcher they usually have options to control whether or not the homescreen & launcher will go into horizontal mode or not, and on both devices I've tried this, if you allow the homescreen to go into horizontal mode everything else follows - including the dialler. This is the only point in the article that I would say is definitively incorrect.

RivieraKid 14y ago

Also icons in Action Bar don't have labels. The label appears after long-pressing the icon but vthe ast majority of users doesn't know this.

ZeroGravitas 14y ago

Most of these are valid, but he undermines his own case with some of them e.g. icons being the same size. That's a valid issue, but the Android guidelines are correct that using every pixel of height would look uneven. It is the same issue with capital letters, A should generally be taller than T so that they visually look equal in height. Dismissing this as "just eyeballing it" is favoring OCD-style logical consistency over actual user interface consistency, since icons with the same pixel height can look inconsistent to users. Time for two of my favourite quotes "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", and "different isn't always better, but better is always different" and to note that this is the kind of article that Gruber used to write about OS X when Apple were rapidly evolving it in it's early days[1]. It seemed to me even then that it didn't recognize the tension between improving what's broken and keeping everything consistent. [1]: http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal http://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal

schme 14y ago

One thing that has been bugging me in ICS and JB is how small textfields behave, especially in text-messages. I tend to write long sms's and occasionally want to change a word from the middle. The 'knob' the author mentions does a good job if I want to get back to the beginning, but I haven't found a way to scroll back to the middle with it. Rolling the typefield itself helps, but after doing that the knob is still very prone to getting me straight back to the beginning/end. Navigation in textfields feels awkward. If I'm scolding the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, do tell, I'd like to hear if it's just me or does someone else feel the same.

89a 14y ago

This OS is such a joke

dlikhten 14y ago

FWIW: In iOS, all icons are varying size, just they have that little border around it forcing all sizes to feel identical. Its a good trick. BTW He forgot to mention: Why is it that on every fucking device out there the back button and menu button are placed in different locations? Like samsung = right, htc = left, google = left, samsung's evil twin = in the middle of the screen.

laserDinosaur 14y ago

My biggest gripe? The fact that they got rid of square menu boxes with icons for long thin rectangular labels. Try mashing "Dismiss" on your alarm at 5am when you need to hit a little thin bar on the screen. "Snooze" you pressed? NO! I meant to hit Dismiss! I understand that some menus now have too many options to fit into a grid of boxes, but it would be nice to have boxes for <5 options and rectangle labels for >5.