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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

Uhhh consistent user interface? Have you recently looked at apps on the android marketplace? You can find anything but consistent user interface. Some copy the iPhone, other have purple square buttons, others have grey Windows buttons. Some have some iPhone keyboard, others use the native keyboard. There is zero consistency in android app.

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I like how people hold the freedom of the Android market against Android. "I want to force every developer to do things Apple's way, because change scares me." The solution to that is to write your own software, not to refuse to let people publish theirs. Want a consistent interface? Shut the fuck up and write some code.

Let me know when my iPhone (+) can turn off its ringer when I get to work, or when I can chat on IRC over ssh, or when I can share my location with my friends automatically. One app may have purple buttons or its own keyboard, but at least my phone can do something useful.

(+) Warning: literary device. I do not actually have an iPhone.

I must second this. I use Locale on my ADP1 (better known as the G1), and it's one of the most impressive things I've ever seen on a phone. I never have to worry again with my cell going off in class, as it knows when my classes are and when to turn the ringer off. This is the precise kind of thing that Apple disallows by restricting you to a set of whitelisted APIs which explicitly do not allow you to mess with system settings or run things in the background. The freedom of the Android market is one of the reasons that I find Android to be a better platform even in a strictly technical sense-- you can simply do more with it.

Have you tried running an Android with multiple apps going at once, especially when its memory is close to full?

No multitasking on iPhone is a feature.

It's not really fair to compare an Android device with 32M of RAM to an iPhone with 256M or RAM.

Try multitasking on a Nexus One or an Archos 5 Internet Tablet. It works brilliantly.

What?

I've got an HTC Hero with 200-some megs of RAM. Open a couple apps, thing slows way down and gets choppy.

Change scares users. By forcing developers into one consistent UI, Apple has done the correct thing from a user-friendliness standpoint.

* Want a consistent interface? Shut the fuck up and write some code.*

This approach leads to the exact opposite of a consistent UI. Look at desktop Linux.

It's consistent for whoever wrote it.

If you want your definition of consistent, you are going to have to write your own software.

Is this a serious comment? If you write your own software towards your own definition, then, by definition, others have different definitions, thereby making things inconsistent.

The correct solution for Android would be for Google to release UI guidelines (perhaps these exist, I don't know) - but don't stop developers from innovating and then letting the users decide what is best.

> This approach leads to the exact opposite of a consistent UI. Look at desktop Linux.

Ever looked at the KDE desktop? It's much more consistent than both osx and windows.

at least my phone can do something useful

Meanwhile, my iPhone does useful things in ways which are usable.

But seriously, we get it already. You hate the iPhone with the heat of a thousand supernovas, and don't seem to feel bound by much of anything -- logic, facts, basic civility -- in coming up with ways to express that hatred. Meanwhile, life goes on and the world doesn't end just because somebody liked something you didn't like.

Speaking as a happy Android Dev Phone 1 owner, yes, I have looked at the apps on the marketplace. No, it's not perfectly consistent, but it's rather damn good for the most part. Moreover, it's improving all the time as Google improves the native keyboard and identifies what tools developers want. It's sheer hyperbola to say that there is "zero consistency" in Android apps.

I think the big concern people have is the version mismatching going on. A lot of people who bought Android phones have been burned by their carriers not keeping the hardware updated. Result: they can't run a lot of apps.

This is in sharp contrast to the iPhone store where you hit this problem incredibly rarely. So it's obviously going to be a talking point.

P.S. “hyperbola”, huh? Thank you, made my day.

I agree, but that's a different problem. Consumers need to get angry with carriers and manufacturers that drop the device at the first sign of obsolescence. That carriers are jerks says nothing about the platform itself, but rather that Google isn't successfully strong-arming carriers into supporting handsets for a reasonable length of time.

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