Android Team “Laser Focused” On The User Experience For Next Release | Hacker News Reader

Android Team “Laser Focused” On The User Experience For Next Release

techcrunch.com

38 points16g39 comments

I'm more than pleased with how Android looks and behaves on the Nexus One. Obviously it can only get better from here, but I really hope that Google tries to avoid going the exact same route of Apple with their iOS. Apple has a lot of desirable features on the iPhone, but also many quirks that I can never, ever get over.

On top of this, I'm not a huge fan of how they're doing multi-tasking, and the introduction of "wallpapers" make the new iOS look ridiculous. They should have stuck with what they had before, in my opinion.

I think there's some confusion over how Apple is implementing multitasking. Apps continue to run in the background, and when you re-open them you'll be back to where you were. The operating system will begin to terminate the apps when it is low on resources. In addition, there are certain services that work a little bit differently, like VoIP, music in the background, tasks that need extra time to run, etc. As far as I'm aware, this is very similar to the way that Android implements it.

The wallpaper feature is there if you want to use it, but Apple has included some darker pattern wallpapers if you prefer a low key background behind the icons. Of course, one could always whip up a plain black background to use too.

> Apps continue to run in the background

No they don't, that's the point. The first multitasking you talk about is basically app hibernation, it gets a CPU priority of 0 (no CPU at all but stays in memory), the rest are OS services the application subscribes to, and then the OS manages the rest.

Apart from Task Completion (maybe) the application never runs. With some services (location, background streaming/music, local notifications) a callback may run (on a timer or all the time), but not the whole application, far from it.

> As far as I'm aware, this is very similar to the way that Android implements it.

Nope, the UI part is handled the same way (by freezing it on switch) but in android there are no OS services, instead a backgrounding application works as a server daemon (faceless) and the UI is a client communicating with the daemon. Faceless daemons don't get frozen, because you can't "switch off" from them.

What sort of quirks? I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts.

Now we just need someone to build a phone without vomiting their own crappy interface all over it. The Nexus One is great, but can't we have a bit more choice than 1?

Wanting choice and keeping companies from customizing their product to differentiate them seem to be goals that are at odds with each other.

However, I've used a number of android based phones and I still find the Nexus One's interface to be the best and cleanest.

Yeah, I'm not mad at Google, I'm disappointed with HTC, Motorola and Samsung.

You're disappointed because HTC, Motorola and Samsung provide choice, or because the choices they provide suck?

I'd like to see some stronger innovation, but that some subset of the choices suck just provides a solid reason to pick the better option. Even a bad example is an example, in that we all learn what doesn't work, and we can cherry pick the best things from a number of different sources. The wider ecosystem in carrier-customized Android interfaces means finding out faster which featuers ones are not strong.

The best case scenario is a number of interfaces that are so good that people have a hard time choosing, and the competition between then keeps them all on their toes trying to out-do the other. This may not be the best thing for the businesses (re. profit margins), but it is the best thing for the consumer.

> You're disappointed because HTC, Motorola and Samsung provide choice, or because the choices they provide suck?

I'm guessing #2, and they don't merge their (hypothetical) improvements upstream to improve the whole platform.

Why would they merge their improvements upstream. That would only lead to them losing their (hypothetical) competitive advantage. Handset manufacturers don't care about the android platform they care about their own implementation of the android platform. The battle isn't iPhone vs. Android, it's Apple vs HTC vs Motorola vs Samsung vs SE vs LG vs Nokia vs... Samsung is just as (un)likely to help HTC or LG as they are to help Apple.

Absolutely.

And that, in essence, is probably the biggest issue I see with Android in its fight against the iPhone.

It's even worse than Mac vs PC as at least Windows (at a given revision) looked and behaved pretty much the same on every machine. The theming was light (especially early on, when there was no support for it) and manufacturers added crap, but didn't replace whole subsystems just because.

I also find that to be an incredibly stupid strategy (but in prisoner's dilemma terms considering all the player are bastards...): the first worry of the players in the mobile phone space should be to drive Apple out of it as fast and as soon as possible, avoid their repeat of the iPod and their conquest of a majority marketshare.

Therefore the long term strategy should be to collaborate and make the common platform as good as possible as soon as possible (on all aspects) in order to push Apple out of the market, using hardware to differentiate themselves, and when Apple is stuck into a small minority box (or entirely driven out) they can go back to bickering among themselves and releasing custom shells and stuff.

Actually, if you look back at the early days of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, it was very common for OEM's like Compaq, HP, Packard Bell, etc. to include their own proprietary "skin" on Windows (usually as shallow as just a replacement for Program Manager).

On a separate note, I don't know why everyone always casts this as an Android vs iPhone fight. Android doesn't need to "beat" the iPhone, the iPhone isn't (by a loooong shot) the largest player in the smartphone market anyway. (http://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/the-mobile-os-market/) There's plenty of marketshare for both iPhone and Android to take away from RIM and Symbian, not to mention that smartphone market is growing very rapidly as a whole.

As long as the sales of Android phones keep growing anywhere near as rapidly as they have been, Android will be HUGE even if they never take any marketshare away from the iPhone. (http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2010/05/27/deciphe...)

> There's plenty of marketshare for both iPhone and Android to take away from RIM and Symbian, not to mention that smartphone market is growing very rapidly as a whole.

Symbian is being eaten alive right now and fading fast, so that one's happening, and the iPhone (and Android behind it) have decided to shoot for the wider consumer landscape, not for RIM's entrenched "Enterprise" position. They're slowly adding enterprise-targetted features (VPNs and the likes) but that's secondary for now, they're not trying to battle RIM. Yet anyway.

But this is cast as a battle between iOS and Android because they are going head to head in terms of demographics, purpose, abilities, mindshare. The means are different but Google clearly aims Android at the target iOS opened, and it's not like they're shy about it.

My point being that there's plenty of marketshare for both platforms to succeed. The competitors are currently larger, and really don't have a compelling offering compared to Android and iPhoone.

It's particularly easy to install something like CyanogenMod or other custom ROMs on most Android devices (the good ones, at least). That gets rid of things like Sense and puts you back to the stock image, but with possibly better hardware than even the Nexus One.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty the Motorola Droid has vanilla Android installed.

Edit: This doesn't really address your complaint since 2 vanilla Android phones isn't really that much different than one, but just wanted make sure the Droid wasn't left out.

The Android Team should build skins/themes like Windows OS. So we have choices.

Sounds perfectly reasonable and I hope they can pull it off. Google hasn't shown the UI design sensitivity necessary to compete with the iPhone UI, but they are determined and iterate quickly, so they can probably get to a point where their UI will be better than what handset manufacturers can come up with.

Openness is great, but being open without setting a high standard is not good in the long run.

Very exciting to see the major strides they're making. Unfortunately not all the updates are getting rolled out to all users, which makes it harder to get people "selling" the phone to their friends. I've got a G1 Dev phone and I'm still stuck on 1.5-1.6 (or something similarly ancient), so I guess I'm really hoping I can somehow swing an upgrade to a Nexus for myself :/

Get Cyanogenmod 5.0.7. It is Eclair for Dream (ADP1 included) and Magic.

Someone needs to tell the Android Team that User Experience isn't a feature. It is fundamental design decisions early on that determine what the user experience is.

That's like arguing a poorly designed home will function better after a fresh coat of paint.

No, it's more like a gut and redo, while leaving the structural elements alone.

And they say they are happy with the structural elements.

I say kudos if they can pull it off. Ignoring the possible meddling of the various device manufacturers, they have their work cut out for them.

I want to be optimistic here; it is just I've never seen such re-engineering done before for any OS.

UI redesign will most certainly take place on the homescreen, the launcher, the dialer, etc. In other words: in it's own seperate applications, this wouldn't conflict somewhere because it's done quite frequently. Android is themeable quite nicely, so even changing the standard dialogs from one style to another _should_ work. My own concern here is that some developers probably have written their own UI code and some custom hacks. But we'll see about that.

UI is about how things work first, about styling second. Themes are not going to help you with the former.

Correct. And i don't think they want to change how things work. The mechanisms how to operate android are fine. Or do you have an example what fundamental functionality should change?

It matters how badly the current home design is though. A manual opening garage is bad, but can be fixed easily patched up.

Honestly, the UI on Android is not fundamentally bad. I really only see patchwork to improve the weak parts:

1) More responsiveness/smoother scrolling (hardware/low-level software issues).

2) Better text selection, copy/paste (perhaps iPhone-like - or some other solution).

3) Improved default apps. (market, calendar, camera especially come to mind as being sub-par to the iPhone).

With the WebOS UI designer and most features you want in the OS, this will be an important step for Android. The OS is stable and mature with 2.2. Actually i like the UI on the Nexus One very much, but i'm sure it can be improved from good to awesome with the team focused on it. Somewhere on Google I/O was a screenshot with Gingerbread on it, but i guess this will change.

edit: very early Gingerbread screens: http://www.sizzledcore.com/2010/05/22/android-3-0-screenshot...

That's good.

Problem: what about Sense and Motoblur? Think HTC and Moto are going to drop them just because the Android UI bas improved? yeah right...

Agreed: why would they drop them now, unless they were just startlingly worse? They aren't interested in Android's success outside of their devices, they want to differentiate themselves.

Even if they are startlingly worse (motoblur seems pretty universally hated, and Sense seems to strongly polarize, some people find it very nice, others find it awful and full of useless gradients and badly polished looks), I doubt they're going to drop them.

And this is terrible for Android as a platform, in my opinion worse than the issue of hardware fragmentation and maybe even worse than the handsets left in the dust re. OS updates, because it means UI knowledge becomes non-portable from one Android handset to the next, which is horrible.

Correct, they will never stop doing it. But they will eventually start seperating it more, letting the user chose to use the standard home screen and dialer for example. Not sure of the Sense UI but it shouldn't be no problem to make it just another (preinstalled) alternate home screen where the user can chose to switch to the standard home.

Also work on the UI side hopefully also means faster portation of those UIs. Not sure why it takes Motorola/HTC/Sony so long to port their versions to the latest Android code, but i guess this can be improved on the Android side of things, too.

The Android Team needs to aim pass the IPhone UX if they plan to win. The Android platform needs to tighten their controls around the UI a little bit more. The very least they can do is make it so that when people look at a smart phone/device, they instantly recognize it as an Android powered device. I think that will help the brand a little bit.

As a counterpoint, how many people can look at a Symbian phone and instantly recognize it as a Symbian powered device? Yet Nokia sells vastly more Symbian powered smartphone than Apple sells iPhones: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/5/21/smartphones-b...

You're right. Symbian does sell more devices when there were no real competition.

They sell more devices than Apple does right now.

You're right again. I guess the right question would be who is growing and who is shrinking.

I'd prefer if they were laser focused on removing dlavik and releasing a native SDK that doesn't get bottle necked by a broken ass vm. This is a mobile device people. Treat it like one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com