Google is making better apps for the iPhone than for Android | Hacker News Reader

Google is making better apps for the iPhone than for Android

theverge.com

65 pointsdigital5525 comments

I'm convinced that people at Google don't really use their own Android apps much. There are fundamental obvious problems.

Two examples - "Play" Music puts a lot of effort into not playing. Anything less than a perfect network, or having played a song or two seems reason enough for it to stop. Comically the most common thing we see is an error dialog about errors streaming, that popup on the times it does start playing successfully.

The other example is Keep. I last made a change on desktop 3 days ago. Today outside the store I started the Android version, where it proceeded to show me the most recent items I added in the unticked section, but ticked. Ticking one of them then moved it to the ticked section, and caused another relayout where the content was bizarre, followed by another relayout about 10 seconds later that was correct. I've also had the ui lockup when there is no network connectivity, which seems a rather fundamental programming error. You shouldn't need network to tick an item in a shopping list!

The funny thing about Play Music is that the early versions were really solid. I streamed mp3 from my Google account while driving all the way from Chicago to Cleveland back when I had a Nexus S 4G, and Sprint's network was not what you would call perfect.

Isn't The Verge biased and very pro Apple? At least that's the stigma I read online that The Verge is basically Apple News.

EDIT: Maybe instead of downvoting, just prove me wrong.

I think, as a rule, the burden of proof falls first upon the claimant.

You have made a claim with no evidence to back it up, only hearsay.

This is why so many who frequent HN include citations for even trivial comments.

Well, I was asking if that claim I read online is true or not and if it should be considered if The Verge is biased or not. That is all I tried to do!

Your question could definitely have been more neutral. I think most people read it as you trying to invalidate the article.

If you're getting downvotes (none from me), it's likely from exasperation that anyone is even bringing this up in the first place. Read comment threads on the Verge where people complain about bias- they almost always appear to be written by toxic high school kids who draw way too much of their self-image from which gigantic corporations their parents have bought their devices from.

The comments on the Verge used to be at least a little better than those on Engadget/Gizmodo/etc., but they've mostly devolved into the usual prepubescent Markov chain noise floor that article comment threads on the internet always sink to in time.

You're correct. It's even referred to as iVerge on reddit/r/Android (despite that sub being regularly trolled by the remaining Apple faithful).

That said, if you speak ill of Apple on HN, you should be prepared to be downvoted. The Apple zeal runs deep here.

I stand corrected! If /r/Android says it, it must be true.

Oh and because you said "If /r/Android says it, it must be true.", then it must be false. Did we move the conversation forward now? No.

I'll add my voice to the ones who say that The Verge gives me the vibe that they're in love with Apple and are very biased towards them. Big deal! Why would anybody be so intent on defending Apple or The Verge here on HN unless they definitely harbored their own bias?

Also, who is completely free from bias? Anyone you know? I'm just saying - it's not some colossal accusation...but obviously the Apple faithful here cannot stand for it.

Anyway, if lots of people say the same thing then there might be some truth to it, just like if you see some smoke, there might be a fire nearby.

It's hardly as though they're coy about their preference:

> For instance, I’m on record as saying [Apple's] most important product, the iPhone, is the best smartphone on the market. So is The Verge overall.

...is the second sentence of an article [1] linked from the words "increasingly subpar" in this line from the article here under discussion:

> Of course, these Google apps still don’t feel nearly as integrated into the iPhone as Apple’s own, increasingly subpar, apps.

So I don't think it's entirely justified to argue that Verge's general editorial preference for Apple's mobile offerings means they're unwilling to judge those offerings harshly where it's deserved.

That said, it's not as though the claims they make in the article under discussion are hard to evaluate for yourself. It's also not as though it even makes sense to claim this article is tainted by a pro-Apple bias; the point they're making is not "android sucks lol", it's that they're amazed the company which makes the Android OS produces consistently better fit and finish in their software for their competitor's OS than for their own. So I'm sort of confused as to what exactly you think you're contributing here.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/3/10900612/walt-mossberg-appl...

They had some very unprofessional coverage of android products (last one I remember was the google photos app, but that's more than 1 year ago now). Not all articles are that bad, but in general they are less knowledgeable on the android side, yes.

Yep, I stopped visiting The Verge dialy for that reason. Day after day of Apple fanboy articles.

From my limited mobile development experience, this probably has a lot to do with the same old story for Android: fragmentation, and the fact that iOS is tailored to a limited set of hardware.

Less time fighting the platform means more time to make a great app experience.

iOS 9 adoption is around 90%.

https://mixpanel.com/trends/#report/ios_9

That makes software development much easier. ios 10 will reach the same adoption level by this time next year.

This is a direct result of the Android API's being fucking bizarre.

It's been quoted that they expected Android development frameworks to be built on top of them, so they didn't make them developer friendly - but they also reach up so far (see the Activity / Fragment nightmare) that it's complicated to make a development framework on top of them.

I tried an android for a couple of weeks recently, I tried it using the "Oneplus 3" as it was good bang-for-buck and ran the latest software with plenty of grunt. Hardware wise the unit is lovely, not as high build quality as my iPhone 6s+ but not nearly as bad as the Samsung Galaxy S3 I had tried in the past. The OS looked pretty... at first, then I started installing apps and it very quickly felt messy. I noted that the general 'quality' of android apps felt quite poor. Nothing seemed to integrate very well, if at all and a lot of apps felt like they hadn't been maintained for quite some time despite being the 'the best option' available.

I had a go at disconnecting my from the clutches of google first by trying not to sign into any of their applications and disabling all the information reporting in settings, I felt like y was a bit like how iOS was back in the iPhone 3G days when you had to root the phone to do half the things you wanted.

I then ended up flashing a custom rom that was pretty much stock, but without the good stock apps, I had to install the google App Store and create an account which I think is fair enough because I couldn't be bothered dropping custom downloaded apks and using that dreadful android transfer tool from my laptop which seems to work 4/5 times you plug your phone in, but like a lot of the apps in the ecosystem - felt very 'javaish' (pun slightly intended).

Anyway, I'm going to wait for Fedora or similar to becoming installable on the device then use it as a mini server / portable desktop because android just feels so fragmented and I can't help but feel like I can't trust the platform or the company that created it.

Hardware wise the OP3 felt like it was design with more care than any other Android phone I'd spent any fair amount of time, I love that it uses a USB-c port but was disappointed to find that it was actually only USB 2.0.

I use both ios and Google's stock Android. I would say they are both just as "messy" although it seems like I can integrate with other apps easier on Android than ios. Perhaps you were running into issues with non stock is? Perhaps you need to find better apps as well. The video editor I use on Android is better then on ios. Fb on Android is almost as good, although the app wont upload HD video. But really there are pros and cons of both, especially now that I can use swipe on ios.

I'm hoping Android without Google takes off, and we can get a good ecosystem no matter whether GApps are good or not.

I'm hoping sailfishos takes off.

They don't give a lot of directly comparable examples. Hangouts, for example, might not be getting a lot of development love right now with Allo and Duo being prepared for launch.

Hangouts isn't a good example to pick apart. The iOS app usually gets updates sooner than Android; it's not just a recent thing. Wifi calling, voice messages, redesigns all came first to iOS and then later (or never) came to Android.

As far as I can tell, Hangouts never got much development love. It's always been buggy and inconsistent, and trivial issues will linger for years.

Come to think of it, that's pretty much what all Google-on-Android apps are like.

Them and everyone else :)

Is anyone surprised? Google tends to release some products/services in 'beta' mode and some of them tend to get abandoned or go on life support before having the plug pulled. Having said that, a lot of their offerings have an immense amount of polish and I'm grateful to be using them.

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