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Comment by thanhhaimai | Hacker News Reader

It's funny you mentioned this. When I was on iOS, I was never satisfied with the icons (or the UI in general). I always wanted to customize it. The stock colors/design just left me wanted for more. It's an unconscious feeling; there is no concrete thing to pin point and say that the UI is bad.

What's strange is that, since I switched to Android a couple years back, I no longer had the urge to change the icons or customizing the UI. There is something about the design that makes it feel "okay". You don't feel like you're fighting the phone or being left wanted for more.

I just picked up an iphone from family to check it out, and instantly feel the need to customize it. For all the UX experts, is there a theory/phenomenal for this that I can read more?

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I don't think it's really that Android design is more "okay." I think it's that the iOS (and moreso macOS) icon design-language has the potential for some really distractingly-beautiful outlier icons — icons that really twig on people's "gathering fresh ripe fruit" reward system. And when there's some of those sitting on your Dock as part of your every-day experience, you start to both:

1. want every icon to be as tantalizing as those icons already are (and so desire to customize the "lesser" icons to achieve that); and

2. feel like something very precious has been lost whenever an icon is made less tantalizing.

I would hazard a guess that the "greyscale makes people less addicted to their phones" research is more true for iOS users than Android users. iOS just has a higher average level of visual addicting-ness in its design. (Which, to be clear, has nothing to do with differing levels of "polish" or anything like that; addicting-ness is its own thing. Some [good] design-aesthetics have it; other [also good] design-aesthetics don't.)

The Photos icon on macOS Catalina and iOS (I haven't taken a look at the Big Sur redesign yet) looks like literal candy—it's a great example of this phenomenon, in my opinion. I love how the colors blend together and overlap with partial transparency.

That's interesting, I experience the exact opposite. I find iOS quite satisfactory after some very light customization (mainly wallpaper), but when using Android something consistently feels missing and although it drives an urge to customize, I'm not sure could be sated through any amount of tweaking.

Are you used to iPhone? Would you try to make it work like the iPhone way?

Do you feel the same with an iPad? I do with my phone but I think it has more to do with your utility of it. The iTunes app may not look proper in your computer. Android may simply suit you better. Do you find yourself trying to make it work like Android?

Not a UX person.

There's a threshold after which something is so good it's worth criticizing?

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