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Absolutely, I'll admit that straight away. It's very much a different expectation of how you use it, and I think that's at the core of Gruber's complaint. He is very used to the iPhone paradigm, where you engage with those bite-sized pieces and then you stop and go do something else. His complaint seems to be that Android doesn't really have bite-sized pieces like that which flatly trump their iOS couterparts, but I think it misses the point because Android isn't just an ugly iPhone, it's a completely different approach to mobile computing.

He's effectively asking "Why isn't the Nexus One a better iPhone than my iPhone?" which...just completely misses the point. The iPhone does the iPhone experience extremely well, and I don't think you'll find many people who will seriously argue that the iPhone UX isn't amazingly polished, but the assumption that it's the only way to use a mobile phone is naturally going to lead you into some completely wrong conclusions. If your whole world is the iPhone, the concept of Android intents and what they mean for how you use your phone is going to be completely lost on you.

I think that "beautiful" apps start with the platform. Most people would agree that OS X has better aesthetic sense than Windows, and most would agree that iOS has better aesthetic sense than Android. Each platform establishes a baseline for what apps should look like, and apps tend to conform to that baseline for the sake of uniformity. On Windows, the worst-looking apps are the ones that diverge from the OS baseline (I'm looking at you, iTunes and anything that uses GTK+). Android's baseline is pretty low - it's highly utilitarian and very typical of Google, which is famous for doing all of its UI design based on how things test out, and while there are some apps that diverge and look good (Twitter, Tweetdeck), there are others that are just terribly bad (Fring, for example).

My hope is that Gingerbread raises that baseline, and sets a new visual target for developers to hit with their apps. We'll see.

> iOS, however, takes a different tack, focusing on self-contained, bite-sized apps. You hop into something, use it, then leave.

Right, if you think of the user workflow as a graph, the iOS enforces a kind of star topology on the experience. That's the model it's built on. You start from the homescreen, then jump to an app, then back to the home screen, repeat.

Android is more of a web browser stack model, you jump into an app, that app may launch another app, but you can always hit back and slide one step back, if you hit "back" enough, you end up where you start (or you can shortcut it with the home key). The user workflow graph is more random as people bump around between apps.

It would probably be more appropriate to call Android apps "pages" instead.

> I see Android and iOS relating very similarly to Windows and OS X.

Actually I think the comparison Gruber makes of 'PC vs Console' is more accurate.

From what I've seen, this ideal workflow is not near as much of a reality on cheap Android phones with not as great hardware. It is a reality on phones like most of the Droid series (I own a Droid 2) and the Nexus One, but most of the people I know with Droids have the cheaper phones like the LG Ally and Motorola Backflip which just don't work as nicely this way. You end up wanting to go back to the app paradigm on phones with smaller screens and slower processors.

I don't understand how Android allows you to pass data between applications while iOS does not. I'm under the impression that I can use copy/paste and custom protocols to pass information between applications on my iPhone. Am I missing something?

If there's any cultural divide Gruber alludes to, it's that iPhone users tend not to know a whole lot about how the phone works deep inside, and whether by necessity or curiosity, Android users do.

You say "iPhone users tend not to know a whole lot about how the phone works deep inside, and whether by necessity or curiosity, Android users do."

I don't think that is true. Most Android users have no idea how their phone works inside. They are not techies, they are just smartphone users. Most people have no idea what a computer does inside. Don't think that all Android users are techies because many on HN are.

I probably know a dozen people in my circle of friends with Android phones at this point. Of those, maybe 3 would give you any more than a blank stare if you asked them what CDMA and GSM are. I'm the only one out of that group that has a rooted device.

I think technically inclined people are more drawn to Android, but I don't think that anything close to the majority of Android's user base is technically inclined by a long shot.

I don't mean hardcore, nuts and bolts stuff, just that they're more involved with managing how the operating system behaves. And I'm not saying this, I was inferring from Gruber, who notes how many task managers, etc., are the most popular apps.

That's the worst kind of user, though. The "power user" is almost the bane of my existence as they do not truly understand anything yet think they understand everything.

These are the same morons that dig into the Windows registry for "super speed optimizations" and end up blowing their installation to hell.

Applications on iOS aren't allowed to touch storage outside of their own data store or the photo roll. Some developers used to backdoor around this by passing data via the photo roll, but Apple started denying app approval for this a while back.

Some developers used to backdoor around this by passing data via the photo roll

I've never heard of an app that did that. Can you name some?

I got it slightly wrong, it seems. Devs were using the photo roll as a way around the lack of USB mass storage support on the iPhone.[1] It's the Address Book that some devs have used to pass data between apps.[2]

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/02/apple-stanza-usb/

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/220630/how-to-share-custo...

Still wondering what apps uses that trick, and which ones have gotten rejected for trying to use it ;)

Well, it's pretty clear that Stanza (from my first link) got in hot water with Apple given they pulled the feature at Apple's behest.

As for the address book thing, I can't name any specifics as I don't follow iOS overly closely; I just know it's a hack I've seen mentioned enough times that it seems to be fairly common knowledge that it can be done, just with the caveat that it's also against the rules.

TextExpander uses it for their SDK. Snippets you add in the TextExpander app is available to other apps which integrate with their SDK.

When speaking of passing data between applications, I'm specifically thinking of the use cases enabled by Android's intent system. Applications can register their ability to respond to and fulfill certain interactions, and then the OS mediates between them.

Say, for instance, you're in the Twitter app and click on a link. Instead of embedding a UIWebView, the application fires off a message saying it needs something to display a webpage. The OS then looks at the list of applications that can handle that intent and selects the best one available. If you only have one application that can fulfill that intent, it launches and renders the linked page. If you have multiple browsers, Android prompts you, with an option to remember your preference for that intent.

Which means that I can click a link in Twitter and open it in Opera. Or Firefox. Or any third party browser. And then when I open a link in another application, my preferred browser still gets to handle it. The Twitter app doesn't get to own that experience in the same way that it can on iOS, since it's actually backgrounding itself and letting the other application fully handle the task.

This also applies to getting directions, calling people, sending text messages, etc. The necessary data (an address, phone number, or message) is transparently shunted from the first app to the next. That dance greatly weakens the boundaries between applications, but enables some really great workflows.

Similarly, say I'm looking at my photos and I want to share one with someone. I simply hit the "Share" button, and up pops everything that can handle working with an image. In my case: Bluetooth, Messaging (SMS), Picasa, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and Gmail. Even better, were I to get fed up with the official Twitter client and go install Seesmic, it'd also pop up in that list, automatically, and without any changes to the Photo Gallery itself.

Say I install an FTP client. It'll also appear in that list. Google Goggles, too. Any image I can share, I can also send to Goggles for analysis.

As far as I know, there's nothing like this on iOS, but I'd be happy to learn that I'm mistaken.

Not all applications embed a UIWebView, and many that do also offer opening in Safari as an option. There are also between-app communications like Twitter's "Save Draft to Birdhouse..." or sending addresses to the Maps application. Not as flexible as the workflows you describe in Android, to be sure, but in that data is being passed between its apps, I believe it was overly broad to describe iOS as focusing only on "bite-sized" and "self-contained" apps.

What about opening in Opera? Skyfire?

I really think the Android back button makes all this possible (and perhaps better than on iOS devices. If a link in the iOS twitter app opens Maps, the only way to get back to where you were (pre-iOS4) was to hit home and launch the twitter app... which may have saved its state. In Android, such a workflow would just involve pressing the universal back button. I suppose in iOS4, you can now double tap home and find the twitter app in the list of open apps.

That's not to say Android is better for opening map links from twitter... just that it's a different way of doing things. I would say that most criticisms people have when jumping from android to iOS (or vice versa) stem from trying to use one OS in exactly the same way you used the other OS.

I agree, the back button is one of the best parts of the Android experience. I find myself reaching for it every time I go back to my iPod Touch.