Google’s apps to embrace iOS on iOS | Hacker News Reader

Google’s apps to embrace iOS on iOS

sixcolors.com

268 pointsingve205 comments

Good. Whether it’s on a device or on the web, I find material design to be a terrible aesthetic. Any kind of flat design in general is often very difficult to understand, the UI components blend in with things that are not interact-able.

Which non-flat design language do you like most?

Windows up until the downfall starting with Windows 8.

Windows 95, the pinacle of UI design. Honorable mentions: Gnome 2 with Clearlooks or Mac OS 9.

On the modern side, SerenityOS is going the right way.

OS X circa 10.6 – 10.9. Aesthetically pleasing, with lots of tonal contrast and touches of color to highlight important items. Clickable elements are clearly clickable, and the UI is reasonably dense, but it never looks overcomplicated or busy.

It is the copious amounts of whitespace that I find so very offensive in Material UI.

My secret guilty pleasure at work is shooting down any mention of using Material UI design in any of our software haha.. it is just silly how much pleasure I get from it :)

Large amounts of whitespace became vogue around the same time as skinny scrollbars. I don't mind the whitespace -- it makes it easier to see how things are grouped on the screen. But give me back usable scrollbars on non-touch devices, please! As I age I find it harder and harder to see and click on small things, so these newfangled design languages that make UI elements smaller feel very unaccessible.

Maybe I'm just nostalgic but I preferred dense UIs of the 90s. At least those which didn't have too much empty space, and communicated grouping with boring stuff like fieldset.

Now it seems I must scroll forever and there are no discernible anchors to link to. When studying web design in the early aughts the popular Nielson book ("Designing Web Usability") argued for separate pages over a lot of scrolling. For informational sites I think that approach is superior.

IMO the best approach is some kind of amalgamation between scrolling and paging. For example infinite scrolling, but with clear separation between pages and with URL changing to the corresponding page (so I can bookmark it and return to this page later, for example). Infinite scroll as a concept is good. If I'm at the bottom of the page, chances are high that I want to get next page anyway, so why don't you show it for me already. If I don't need it, whatever. If I need it, it's there.

Infinite scroll as a concept is good.

Infinite scrolling doesn't work with scrollbars, and somehow people still think it's okay to put important links in the page footer... on an infinite scrolling site where it's literally impossible to ever reach the page footer.

Be cooler if you could implement Material Design in a more usable way than even Google, no?

Maybe it's me being biased as an Android app developer, but I find Material very much okay on Android (but very out of place on desktop for example). At a time when Apple just made everything fully flat and had a kid draw their icons, having actual depth with shadows felt welcome.

Though I have to admit, I did like the Holo aesthetic more. And I do miss affordances in UIs, and non-flat UIs, in general.

For me, material design evokes feelings of being in kindergarten making crafts with colored construction paper.

Material UIs are not perfectly flat; there is usually a shadow, so I can tell an element is distinct from the layer below it. The problem for me is that it often feels about as organized as the mind of a kindergartener.

Consistency of look-and-feel is important, but consistency of organization is even more important. How confusing would GUIs in the 90s have been without the File and Edit menus?

Can you elaborate on what you mean by the organization of material design?

So what I'm reading is: there's nothing wrong with Material Design aesthetically, but the design choices commonly made when choosing Material Design are regularly poor.

That's fair.

Unlabeled hamburger menu buttons and gear icons placed every which area (sometimes multiple!) are great examples of (admittedly common!) abuse of what can be a powerful UI concept.

Anecdote-not-data warning:

I gave an Android tablet to a 90-something year old. She got on ok but there were a few frustrations. Stuff would close when it shouldn’t, button here just hard to reason about or get to etc. She asked if it was an iPad, obviously some brand awareness there. Switched to iPad as a bit of a fun surprise, and most issues went away. More stuff was where she thought it would be. (She has a feature phone from 14 years ago so it’s not iPhone preference.) She just turned 101 and you can’t take her iPad away from her. Loves it.

We can all get used to whatever. Try it on the edge cases and your opinion might shift because that’s where the differences emerge.

I’m holding back a lot of iOS rants here :) Selecting a single word is often many clicks. I’d love to be able to forget individual words that it insists on autocompleting to.

Sure, material design is not perfect. Its just all other design systems for mobile are worse and less consistent. Apple's own UI is very lacking in components and guidelines are mostly absent.

I find that flat design was the answer to having too much emphasis (in my opinion) on design and designers being too involved in the process which (again, in my opinion) collided with the engineering work..

I could never understand the hatred of skeuomorphic design.

Material design seemed to me to add an unnecessary overhead to interaction especially with colors bleeding in. I love a strong, and arguably ugly, contrast ratio of 7:1

It all comes down to the fact that doing a skeuomorphic design is a lot more work than blurting a few colored rectangles.

It's also more confusing, distracting, and dated. Also super lazy. Good clean song is harder, but more enjoyable to use.

Let's come to a reasonable compromise: skeuomorphic is dated and material is super lazy.

It’s a generational change - much easier to make a career by discarding what came before rather than competing with it. You will see this in a lot of areas of society.

It's funny how a "generation" left Apple and suddenly they're rolling back all kinds of changes to how they were before that generation "made their mark".

It also gets a lot of emphasis because armchair ui architects think it’s cool to show they know this ‘big word’.

The Santa Claus effect by design makes everything made by “adults” obsolete.

Same. I wonder how it would have fared in the world of Apple Pencil, where the feeling of literally writing notes on a yellow pad could have been extended out of the device and in to the world. I like the current stuff and think skeuomorphism ran it's course, but I never hated it and never understood why people did. Apple didn't even come up with it - remember Microsoft Bob? It was just a product of a time when computers had to be more friendly and feel like real stuff and not the other way around.

Skeuomorphic design simply doesn’t work. Turning knobs and dials on a touchscreen? It’s a three dimensional interface slapped on a 2d canvas.

Doesn’t work? The old Apple podcasts app worked just fine. It’s the modern one that breaks and has UI jumping all the time.

You can't judge the success or failure of ANYTHING by the podcasts app (except the podcasts app itself, of course).

Remember old QuickTime with wonky drawers and knobs everywhere? Everyone hated it, and rightly so, and switched to alternatives in every case where they could.

I really like the three “wheel” picker on iOS (used for dates, at least): for coarse changes, I “flick” the wheel a couple times and let “inertia” do its work, then I fine tune it when I’m close.

Sure but I still think shadows and 3 dimensions work.

It can work just fine, just like it can be applied inappropriately.

"skeuomorphic" came into being as a scary label. We should prefer "realism" or something else

It's lazy, ugly, inefficient, unclear, and ugly to look at

Lazy? Unclear?

I would imagine it takes much more work to design something skeuomorphically than it would something flat. And clarity is the top priority - you should instantly know what the thing does upon seeing it.

One of the big factors in modern design is reducing cognitive load by reducing visual distractions. In other words, one goal of simple, clean, non-skeuomorphic designs is to make it easier to understand the interface. I’d be interested to see studies comparing good variants of skeuomorphic and minimal designs.

I wonder if the actual problem is that minimal designs are easier to get wrong. Skeuomorphic designs might be easier to get right just because you’re almost “cheating”: you don’t have to decide on the best way to represent X digitally. You just copy/paste X from the real world as best you can, and people will get it because they already know the IRL interface. As many users are very comfortable with touch interfaces now than 15 years ago, that’s less important.

Frankly, probably the only thing worse than the flat designs are the skeuomorphic designs. Bring back the Windows95-like. Give me edges, shadows and colours, all clearly indicating what the heck this bunch of pixels is meant to be. But without pretending it's a yellowing leather-bound notepad.

I've never been a fan of skeuomorphic design. I'm sure there are good examples of it somewhere. My memories of early apple and iOS apps implementations with fake physical things e.g. desks or bookshelf's, rendered in the background and such made the app feel cheap and had less class. I felt this way even before skeuomorphic design started to become less fashionable.

Right, I think bad skeuomorphism incorporates textures whereas good skeuomorphism incorporates shadow, lighting, and depth

> made the app feel cheap and had less class

This is about usability and familiarity, not eye candy. "flat" stuff is way too abstract for many users thus the very definition of not inclusive design.

When (old and younger) people can't tell what your icon does because you decided to go "flat" at any cost, you failed as a designer.

flat is also boring has no personality. It's appropriate in some contexts (a web form), but not necessarily in others.

Trend and hype drove the change from skeuo to "everything is flat", this was never about good design.

I believe this is partially due to end of the "pixel perfect" era by introducing Retina displays. They did well both until iOS6 but they had limited variant of dpi for their devices. Now they have vary dpi iOS/iPadOS devices like Android.

I couldn’t agree more. I can’t stand using Google’s own apps on iOS because they look jarringly out of place to me, like running a Mac app that looks skinned to look like Windows.

Obviously not everyone agrees and that’s OK. I acknowledge this is purely a personal preference thing. But for me, I detest Material apps on my phone and iPad.

Yeah every time Chrome accidentally opens on iOS I cringe at the shoehorned design choices

This probably happens because i clicked a link in gmail

I feel the exact same way. Google's design sense in general is terrible.

YouTube is a UX nightmare. Gmail and Maps are probably the only two half-decent products but they're both becoming very heavy and bloated these days.

I'd argue that YouTube has a better UX than a large majority of sites on the internet. If it was actually terrible, no one would use it.

They have a monopoly. What other video sharing site is even remotely on the same traffic level (not including social networks like fb)

The YouTube app on Apple TV is absolutely atrocious.

I can’t believe either Apple or Google think it’s acceptable — it must be one of the most-used apps on tvOS, and is easily the worst I’ve ever come across.

It seems to be built with Cobalt [1], so it’s basically HTML5, pretending to be a native app.

A short list of flaws which have infuriated me for months:

• Scrolling is completely broken. Scroll down a playlist, and it stops after 10 or so videos, hangs, then loses your scroll position.

• When you start watching a video, the UI is almost completely unresponsive for the first 5 seconds exactly. You can exit the video, but the title/channel/details are totally hidden for exactly 5 seconds, for some bizarre reason.

• Navigating the app is like wading through molasses, even on the newest Apple TV 4K. It’s so unbearably slow.

• Even if your YouTube account is verified, age-restricted videos refuse to play. You’re told to “switch to your primary account” to watch them, but, I’m already in my primary account!

• A few times I’ve left the app open on a paused video. 20 minutes later, with the Apple TV screensaver now running, the video randomly starts playing again.

YouTube is my primary source of video content — I can’t remember the last time I watched an actual TV show. Many of my friends say the same thing. Come on YouTube, get it together!

[1] https://cobalt.foo/

(I hate to be “that guy”, but seriously — if Steve Jobs was still around, he wouldn’t have accepted this. There are stories of him calling Google execs because he didn’t like the colour on one of their buttons. Anyway, I digress…)

I’m so glad you mentioned this. Trying to navigate to a channel from a YouTube video you’re watching is significantly impaired by the fact that the default behavior is to scrub rapidly in the video timeline, and you have to provide a very distinct “break away” gesture to navigate from the scrubber to the channel controls.

It’s also extremely difficult to like and dislike videos in the app. You have to break away from the scroll bar, then hit a gear and then navigate to the like/dislike button.

I’m glad it’s not just me who hates this.

Most frustrating thing for me: in every other app, you hide the scrubber UI just by touching the touchpad. In Youtube, just touching does nothing, you have to press Menu/Back. That's bad enough, because I can't rely on muscle memory to hide the scrubber. I need to remember if I'm in YouTube or not, because if I hit Menu in any other app, it'll exit the video.

But the scrubber in YouTube also auto-hides after a few seconds. So it's happened a few times that I've reached to press Menu on the remote, and by the time I've done it, the scrubber auto-hid and I just exited out of the video. And of course, it lost my progress.

Really amateurish stuff.

edit: oh, and video titles get truncated after two lines, but there's no indicator that it's been truncated, no ellipsis, nothing -- and no way to view the full title. So if a title contains critical info, you're SOL.

Yes. In my experience, the best way to watch YouTube on an Apple TV is to pull the video up on your phone in safari and AirPlay it over

Not being a big user of YouTube, I just kind of assumed that the AppleTV client was broken due to some tiff between Google and Apple. If I manage to get it to play a video, and that’s a 50/50 proposition at best, some bug will pop up eventually, after which I either give up or AirPlay it from my phone to the TV. So I basically don’t use YouTube on ATV.

But parent comment is saying that it apparently works, but is just broke in a lot of use cases. Based on my experience, this…surprises me.

I think your example of Steve calling and complaining about a color is Google’s logo. Specifically probably the shade of the yellow o. But you could be talking about another story.

> I felt that Google arrogantly believed that people were first and foremost users of Google’s platforms, and benefited from consistency across those platforms

I don't find that arrogant, it's a way of seeing things. It's what I want from apps i use.

Yeah, I am irritated with the inconsistency of the UI of 1Password between MacOS and Windows to the degree now that I'm a couple of free hours away from migrating to Bitwarden.

interesting. i use it on linux and mac, and presumed it’d be the same in windows, because the app is clearly an electron-based app (and _drinks_ RAM as such). is the windows app native?

It may eventually go that way - but I believe the Linux version was the first electron version.

1Password started out as a (well regarded) native Mac app, that they then developed a native Windows app for. By the time they came around to Linux, they decided on Electron (with a rust backend) - they're now moving the Mac and Windows versions to the Electron versions unfortunately.

that's a real shame. i understand that even with modern cross-platform UI toolkits, like qt and wx, multi-platform development is more labor intensive than an electron app.

sublime text has been managing it for a long time though, and is one of the reasons i don't see it ever going away as _the_ text editor.

> i understand that even with modern cross-platform UI toolkits, like qt and wx, multi-platform development is more labor intensive than an electron app.

I don’t think this is a given, it only really becomes true if you have a need to control the UI down to the pixel, and if we’re being honest, very few developers actually need that. Your life as a cross platform dev becomes a lot easier when you accept that the UI will have minor platform-influenced deviations that ultimately have zero negative impact on usability.

That’s one of the reasons Sublime is been able to keep their boat floating — it doesn’t look and feel 100% the same between platforms and even adopts various platform-isms, like the text navigation key shortcuts under macOS.

The only reason “native-ish” cross platform UI frameworks are challenging to use is brand-driven UI design. Do as Google is suggesting they’re going to do and let brand take a back seat and things become a lot more simple.

Sublime doesn't use native platform UI toolkits. They ship their own version of Skia (same as what's used in Chromium) and have their own UI toolkit for the editor rendering.

The point remains that its UI isn’t the same across platforms, like for example it uses whatever the local system font is instead of whatever the designer decides.

The point is that they're using an off-the-shelf icon kit with some native dialogue forwarding. By this definition, VS Code is also a 'native' app, which we know to be untrue.

Frankly, I think the MacOS HID has been dead since Mojave. At some point, developers realized that Cocoa wasn't enough for most apps, and it was an awful lot of work to put into an app that would only be used by a fraction of their customers. Currently, the definition of "native" on MacOS is that it uses loosely the same keyboard shortcuts as your other programs, and if you're lucky then it integrates with your global menu. In the age of webapps and cross-platform development, there's simply not a way that MacOS' approach works. Even niche toolkits like GTK solved this problem better than Apple, which makes it even more mind-blowing when I see Mac developers defend their build system.

Walled-gardens lead to sticky situations like this, where volunteer-driven efforts are more developer friendly than first-party offerings. I weep for the Xcode users who don't know what it's like living on the outside.

I respectfully disagree that GTK is more friendly than AppKit. It may be truly strictly from a cross platform perspective, but AppKit is still unbeaten in variety and capability of UI widgets, especially if front end web is the point of comparison. Just to get an interactive table view that’s comparable in features to NSTableView on the web you’re looking at duct taping together several libraries or reinventing the wheel yet again and writing the whole widget yourself. GTK and Qt better than the web in this aspect but still not as good (custom widgets are still frequently necessary with both toolkits).

AppKit only comes up short in that it’s not built to have its appearance changed dramatically and of course that it’s tied to macOS. If you need cross platform that’s a legitimate limitation, but as noted before brand driven UI design is far from a need.

Mac-native apps are a pain in the butt to maintain, and you're catering to >10% of the computer market when you make one. Now you need to retain developers who specifically debug your Mac problems when they arise, and what's that? Now your app has been removed since Apple made a first-party version. Now your team consists of 8 web devs, 3 MacOS devs who decided to make a native client for fun, 2 lawyers fighting to keep your MacOS app alive and one very confused CEO who doesn't understand why we're wasting our time with such frivolities anyways.

1password 7 on Windows has been around much longer than the linux/electron version - but it's getting "updated" with the "unified experience" in 1password 8.

As someone that tried that - it’s not worth it. ;)

Also I believe 1Password 8 (in “early access”) right now is much more unified across platforms. I haven’t tried it though.

Yes, there was much gnashing and wailing of teeth here when they announced they were abandoning the native experience on Mac.

Bitwarden is great. You can even self-host the server if you want to.

There's even a FOSS alternative for the server, so there's even flexibility there.

Isn't Bitwarden Server AGPL?

If not, you can link me to the alternative?

One popular server implementation is Vaultwarden (originally called bitwarden_rs), implemented in Rust. [1] The Vaultwarden wiki [2] has more details.

[1]: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

[2]: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden/wiki

The popular alternative is bitwarden-rs, and it's usually chosen because it has a much smaller footprint and is well suited to self-hosting where you only have a handful of users.

The official backend is multi-container and uses a full SQL server install.

Minor nit: they've had to change the name to "vaultwarden".

https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden#readme

> Note: This project was known as Bitwarden_RS and has been renamed to separate itself from the official Bitwarden server in the hopes of avoiding confusion and trademark/branding issues. Please see #1642 for more explanation.

I think there may be some confusion here. Reading the original tweets from @featherless, I don't see any intent to actually change the end-user design. For example:

> This evolution of how we approach design for Apple platforms has enabled us to marry the best of UIKit with the highlights of Google's design language.

I'm reading this to say that custom UI components will be replaced with UIKit components that will be customized to have Google's design language. But at a high level, the apps will continue to look the same as they currently do.

> I'm reading this to say that custom UI components will be replaced with UIKit components that will be customized to have Google's design language. But at a high level, the apps will continue to look the same as they currently do.

Yes, going back to the source Twitter thread I also believe that's the correct conclusion. Jason Snell and Steve Troughton-Smith misinterpreted the deprecation of this Material Design implementation to mean that Google was deprecating the use of the Material Design design language on iOS.

In reality, Google is building a new Material Design implementation on UIKit to get better OS integration and a bunch of capabilities (such as accessibility features) "for free".

Yeah, I don‘t expect a drastic shift, but I would expect some details, like the weird material tap animation, to change for the better. Maybe the youtube app will support all iOS screen sizes with their safe area insets and properly sized toolbars. That‘s the kind of thing that the people who write about apple care about.

Yes, the blogpost (and most of the HN comments here) are completely missing the point. This is just about deprecating a library for implementing material design on iOS, not deprecating the design language itself.

It's possible (likely, even) that parts of the design language will become more iOS-y (for example: I would bet that Material 'action sheets' disappear and get replaced with system-default ones on iOS, this has already happened on Chrome for iOS). But the material design language isn't going away.

Honest question to HN readers: which Google apps are you using on iOS, and why?

I’ve bit the bullet and ditched Google ecosystem last year, moving email to Fastmail, buying an iPhone and the like. The only Google app i still use is Maps - they are vastly superior to everything else, with navigation, public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague) and reviews/recommendations built in. Essentially its a three-in-one application with no adequate replacement.

I wonder if I am missing something good from Google.

When I still had iOS I mostly used Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.

I use Gboard because it treats me as an adult, allowing me to type expletives.

Fucked if I know why you can’t type expletives on your iPhone - seems to work fine for me.

I added a contact whose name was all the expletives and now it ducking allows me to swear.

You can type them, but not by gliding.

Ah. Didn't appreciate that. To be fair, it took Apple so long to implement this I've never learned to use the feature.

This seems to have changed now.

As of iOS 15, gliding is able to type expletives for me if they’re added to the “text replacement” list.

Maps and Keep (for a single shared shopping list)

I still use drive and it’s related apps.

There are two things that makes them stand out, ux wise:

1. That round button in the lower right corner that has to be there because it’s material, damn the actual need.

2. If a pane has a horizontal bar, it means that pane is dragable - except of course in Googles apps. Then it’s just there to look at.

While Google maps is more accurate with data, I find Apple Maps good enough and nicer to look at. I occasionally go to maps.Google as a backup.

If you're missing "something good" really depends on what you have a need for. They've offered free SMS for years, which is pretty cool, but niche. You sound like you might like trying Waze, which is also owned by Google.

I wouldn't recommend using any of it, though. It's Google, after all. Not as evil as they come, but pretty bad.

For me the main ones are Map, GMail and Drive/Docs. I'm all-in on MacOS and iOS and have been for over a decade, but those three apps/services are essential for me.

Search obviously, I tried DDG but it's not quite there for me. I tried Brave a few months ago but it was glitchy and unstable, on MacOS at least.

I could probably move to a different email service, but the rest of my family are on GMail and I don't see a strong reason to move.

Why would family be a lock-in factor for GMail? It’s just email.

Takes an entire day to migrate accounts from online services and apps. The flow for this is very bad, on some sites you have to email support and on others it’s impossible.

Even after doing this a year later I still get email to my old account (Uber) even though I’ve updated my email. Some sites you can’t update and there is no support (Stanford medical).

If you admin a Google Apps account on your own domain, with family/friends on it, they have to suffer if you want to migrate away.

DDG for me is 90%, so I use DDG and append !g whenever I don’t get the results I’m looking for. I’d rather have google search as a choice than a default.

Why use the GMail app over the built-in client?

Not the poster but I use it because Mail didn’t support notifications. I’m not sure if that’s still true. A lot of Gmail specific features tend to work better with their app.

Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions my own.

I love Gmail. I've also been an iOS user since day one, and 99% of the time I prefer apps that feel like iOS apps.

I use the Gmail app instead of Mail, even for my personal email, because Gmail has a number of concepts and integrations with other parts of Workspace that don't neatly jibe with the native Mail app. iOS wants to treat labels as folders, which is an approximation. Responding to Calendar events isn't the one-tap, in-place experience it is in Gmail.

The Gmail app also does a few key things a lot better: search is way more sophisticated and reliable; Smart Compose is really brilliant and makes me faster, particularly at knocking out more 'trivial' emails.

The one thing I really miss about iOS mail that Gmail doesn't support is VIP contacts. Gmail has a way of marking emails as 'high priority' and only notifying on those, but its classifier doesn't really match my expectations. As a result, I've just turned off notifications for email. I check it a few times a day. Probably healthier, but esp when I'm waiting for an email from a critical contact, VIP would be awesome.

Good question!

I moved to IPhone after having to follow the uncertain and complicated upgrade roadmaps of Android Phones.

I use Apple Notes and Reminders heavily. They feel stable (of the kind of stability in which you know they won't be just wiped out of the internet) and they just work.

I'm considering moving away from Google Drive since I still cannot make sense of their new Google Sync and Backup client.

I will most likely stick to GMail since I really like the UX.

As other user here points out, GBoard for iOS is wonderful, I can easily type in three languages as a Spanish speaker who speaks to his German SO (mostly) in English.

I use Apple Music and it is very good, nice to have an alternative to Google Play Music, which of course doesn't exist anymore.

Is GBoard useful still if you don’t grant Google full access to the keyboard inputs?

If you want to use Notes and don’t want to trust Apple, you can store the notes on any IMAP server you like.

I don’t know if it is possible to store Reminders outside of iCloud, I don’t really use it.

> public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague)

Give Citymapper a go if you haven't already. I find it vastly superior to Google Maps for public transport here in London.

(And I work at Google so, if anything, am probably biased the other way.)

Moreover, when I see “material design” it puts me off, because it reminds me how I hated my ex-android, playing button “wave” animations but not doing an action. Google ui is flat in all senses, and feels like a low-effort work stretched to the size of idea. Idk why they started to implement that ui for iphone, when it clearly had its own.

Google Maps in Japan is unusable. Many times it directed me which might have been the shortest way but through micro-streets that are really difficult to navigate instead of the more efficient 2-lane.

Utter rubbish with public transport too. Quite often it will suggest the slowest lines to a destination.

To be fair, Japan has specific digital service offerings in a lot of niches that outdo most of internationally aligned competitors with their eyes closed.

Care to share a few examples? Visiting Japan has been on my list for many years. Still hasn't materialised.

It's just many things piling up. transit.yahoo.co.jp for long and short distance public transport, maps.yahoo.co.jp instead of US map services, tabelog.com for restaurant reviews, navitime for car navigation etc. Note that the desired functionality is often available only in Japanese. If the sites have international/English versions, often you get a lite version at best and a dummy version without much content in the worst case. You can observe that for example already when you research the Narita Express rail service; the JR pages in English always have less detail and info than the JP ones. A good thing about Japan's online services is that a lot of them are not "apps" they're web sites and the apps just containers for the web sites, on Android more often than not anyway, as Japan is iPhone country. So you get the same services from your desktop as on your smartphones, and many service websites still have proper, fully featured mobile web versions, as opposed to many Western online services making their mobile web versions increasingly unusable, pushing apps, like .e.g. reddit. Also JP web is much more pleasant than Anglo web in my opinion; they have stuck with a combination of "tables tables everywhere", hypertext links, and dead-simple HTML markup plus colorful icons/ads/banners in plain image formats from the late 2000s which is very easy to read, e.g. https://www.jreast.co.jp/ltd_exp/guide/#price_area2 Easy to read, easy to use.

I found Google Maps worse than Apple Maps in both Japan and South Korea, it's kind of crazy that's the case given that Google has had such a lead. It makes me wonder whether Google is investing much into these products anymore.

How do you make Apple maps work with kanji and romaji addresses at the same time? Half the time I'm driving somewhere, I have to painstakingly translate addresses before the search finds it (and even that's not 100%)

I’ve noticed that Google Maps has this really strong desire to rat run. It really likes taking tiny roads, and making excessive turns to reduce your transit time by a few seconds or minutes.

Unfortunately it usually ends up being slower, because the tiny road aren't faster, Google just has very low accuracy speed data for then.

Apple Maps on the other hand tends to prefer simpler routes with fewer turns. In London this means Google will take you down a maze of backstreets, which frequently have turn or modal restrictions (specifically put in to prevent Google Maps style navigation) Google doesn’t know about. Whereas Apple Maps tends to stick to main thoroughfares, which are always quicker and much less stressful to use.

For me the classic example is driving from east to west across London. Google maps will insist on taking the wiggliest route that’s entirely 20mph speed limits. Apple Maps will suggest heading out east to a ring road and looping back west to your destination. A longer (slightly slower) route, that about a billion times easier to navigate.

It's interesting to hear that. Here in the UK I find GMaps way better than Apple maps in a number of ways. Apple maps has a frustrating habit of sending you to anything but the proper entrance to large venues or places of interest, it's become something of a running joke with my wife who insists on using it when driving.

It goes to show how these companies are much less monolithic than we might sometimes assume.

Really? Are you aware of any alternative that actually works well?

I've been trying to move to OSM but so far i haven't found any usable alternative that actually gets and has good coverage of Japanese addresses in Kanji/hiragana as well as romaji. Apple Maps is way behind Google here (and I find Apple Maps otherwise quite usable in Europe).

Apart from in-car navigators (with terrible UI, at least the ones I tried so far) I'm not aware of even domestic alternatives that are usable. All my Japanese friends use Google Maps.

You might want to explore https://www.navitime.co.jp/

IMO, best dataset at the expense of a very Japanese-style UI.

I assume you’re talking about driving. To me Google Maps has worked well when walking around Tokyo, particularly when finding small, hole in the wall ramen shops off the beaten path. I haven’t used it in the city for driving but it’s worked well when going to rural onsen locations. And I prefer it to the rental car’s built in navigation system (which is almost always a Nissan Note).

There is one time it really screwed up. I like walking along those micro streets, lots of interesting stuff to see in neighborhoods. My wife and I were pushing out baby in a stroller and Google maps route sent us along a path that included a giant steep flight of stairs! It wasn’t a big deal by there was no mention that the rout would be in accessible to people who couldn’t climb stairs.

Only Maps. But ditching Maps has been really difficult for me. It's just vastly better than the competition here where I live.

I still use Google Maps. But CityMapper is excellent in urban areas (where available), and organic maps is great for walking directions.

I’m still on Photos. I’d like to move to something else, but I don’t fancy being locked into iCloud.

For me personally I use pretty much all the Google apps. Drive, Docs, Keep, Maps, Home, Gmail, Duo, Search, Photos...

The reason is I have an iPad, Pixel, Windows desktop, MacBook Pro and Linux laptop.

Google's ecosystem is the only one that works well across all operating systems, and Google Home has by far the best voice control.

- Google Maps. It's still the best maps app even though the quality of information they display and suggest has gone downhill.

- Google Photos. About a magnitude of magnitudes faster than Apple Photos when uploading/syncing/sharing/literally anything with photos than Apple Photos which are always stuck in some limbo with no indication of what is happening.

With the same uploaded quality ?

Not the same, but this still doesn't explain why Apple Photos is so dog slow and has so few indicators as to what's going on.

Apple Photos: Uploads stuck? Check. Sharing photos taking up to three hours to show up on the other person's device? Check. Weird formats when sharing (qt/mp4, downsized jpegs/pngs/hvecs) with no controls? Check. And so on and so on.

Google Photos has its quirks. But man is experience so much better.

I have over a dozen Google apps installed on my iPhone and iPad, but there are only three I use enough to have an opinion about: Gmail, Maps, and YouTube Music.

Gmail and Maps work well enough for me, and I have no complaints. I much prefer the street view navigation on the Apple Maps app in areas where it’s available, though.

YouTube Music, which I mainly use on the iPhone, is sluggish and buggy. Album covers, for example, are often slow to load, and sometimes the wrong covers appear next to songs in playlists. I only stay with it because I have a bunch of playlists left over from Google Play Music, which I was satisfied with, and because I encountered annoying technical problems with both Spotify and Apple Music when I tried them a few years ago.

Only tangentially related, I know, but I see google maps quite differently.

First and foremost I want to admit that I have no good comeback to the public transport schedules, that is a good feature.

But regarding mapping and navigation, google maps does not treat you like a human being. It's essentially a catalogue of advertisements, much like google search. It's optimized to guide you to the "nearest pizza place" or what have you, and at least in my area, if you're not looking for a vaguely defined place to spend money and already know your destination you're screwed, quite ironically. Everyone I've talked to around here struggles with it and has developed the strangest procedures to trick gmaps into showing the route they want to see.

I personally use OpenStreetMap and it works very reliably, admittedly after I reconstructed some roads and added some labels to places I visit. Luckily there are many active editors around here, so even when I'm going to visit a new area 99% of the time I get where I want without issue.

Which OSM app do you use?

> navigation, public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague)

Have you given Apple Maps a go recently? In cities where they’ve done the big transport updates (I think Prague is one of them), I’ve found Apple Maps to be far superior to Google Map.

Live transport times, accurate station entrances and exits (great here in London where stations can have half a dozen entrances spread out over half a square mile). Incredible walking and cycling audio instructions, which make good use of cycle paths, and provide instructions using traffic lights as landmarks (e.g. go through the next lights, then turn right).

Reviews etc are a bit crap still, POI data isn’t as good. So the directions to your destination are great, but actually telling Maps what your destination is sometime frustrating. Additionally I’ve noticed a view map errors that result is silly routes, but I suspect Google Maps has the same, i just didn't have the local knowledge to notice them.

I don't know if you can say superior when Google Maps does all those, maybe bar the last one:

> Live transport times, accurate station entrances and exits (great here in London where stations can have half a dozen entrances spread out over half a square mile). Incredible walking and cycling audio instructions, which make good use of cycle paths, and provide instructions using traffic lights as landmarks (e.g. go through the next lights, then turn right).

I think Apple Map’s implementation is substantial more polished than what Google has. So while the top level feature list might be very similar, Apple Maps just works better. This is of course my opinion, but if you haven't used Apple Maps in a while, I strongly encourage you to try it for a week. I think you’ll be impressed with how well it works today.

In areas with good Apple Maps coverage, it provides instructions that are more helpful and usable while driving with a simpler interface than Google Maps.

For complex routing and overall features, Google is still far ahead.

Not sure about the EU but Yandex maps is surprisingly good (yeah, I know - Russian). But at least you don't send your data to Google.

Google translate. I was a Lens app user since iPhone 4. Then Google bought it and incorporated into the translate app. So, I installed it solely for the purpose of using lens functionality.

This functionality is built-in to the camera app from iOS 15 as Live Text.

You might have to turn it on both at ‘General/Language and Region’ and then in the Camera settings.

Live text translate is a pale shadow of what Google translate can do.

> for the purpose of using lens functionality.

Not sure what you are getting at. Isn’t the whole point of the google word lens feature that it translates foreign languages and replaces the text with your language in the image in real time?

> I was a Lens app user since iPhone 4. Then Google bought it and incorporated into the translate app. So, I installed it solely for the purpose of using lens functionality.

Yes, the lens functionality for translating text

Ah, so they are using the translation app solely for the translation functionality.

Live text is a joke in comparison to Lens, unfortunately. It's clear that Apple is a few decades behind on translation technology, their implementation is worse than Translate from when I was in school.

Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Google Calendar

The old Google chat app was better than the current one, but c'est la vie

> and why?

Because ease of use.

Citymapper has great public transport navigation in many areas including Prague.

Apple Maps is becoming better every day, especially for navigation, the place where it lacks is the poi database.

OpenStreetMaps also has a large poi database.

Even though it isn’t as feature filled as the database used by Google Maps, at least you can be sure your app isn’t hiding a restaurant because they didn’t pay for an ad. Which is what happens if you use Google Maps.

No, I’d be done with Google, but nothing competes with Maps, and Earth. Apple maps isn’t cross platform, so useless to me anyway. My nest was just replaced with Ecobee. I still use their search and news, but web only. I am open to switch when I find something better.

And Google Home, because I have a Chromecast so my friends can share content, music from android phones.

I look forward to the change, I find Google’s Material design to be a big visual improvement over what was, but more frustrating to use.

I use Google Calendar because when meetings get changed or updated I would like to know about it at once and not after 15min or 30min or whatever time it takes the default calendar app to get its act together.

I also use Google Sheets on iOS because it’s significantly more useful than Numbers.

Google apps and services + iOS is the sweet spot for me.

iPhone is significantly better than Android for me as a hardware device and OS. But Google apps for productivity are miles ahead of anything Apple has.

YouTube - sadly no alternative

Google Maps - Apple Maps still borks up way too much

I have an iPhone and use almost every Google service available instead of the Apple one. Why? Not because the app is better, but because I'm also using Linux & Windows, as well as a Android tablet. With Google services at least I'm not locked into one platform.

Same story here. I'm very irritated by Google Contacts not being available on iOS. What do you use there?

I’m pretty sure Google contacts are synced into iPhone contacts if you login to gmail

You can just sync the native iOS contacts app with Google

iOS/iPadOS centralize accounts in system settings. You can toggle what services and data you want synced: mail, calendar, contacts, notes. Your google/gmail contacts are natively synced with your phone's contact list. No separate app needed.

Go to Settings > Mail > Accounts > [account name] > toggle services

Some that haven’t been mentioned by others: Google Pay, because it has an integration with my city’s parking meter system that is better than that system’s official app, Google Authenticator, and Google PhotoScan.

Google Maps is still better than Apple Maps overall. There are some nice little features in Apple Maps added in the last few years, but my most recent attempt at using Apple Maps navigation led me to an empty lot.

Did you try the “Transit” app for public transit?

Waze

I guess they don't think Flutter is a good experience for iOS apps. When you don't eat your own dogfood, why would you expect others to do so?

Well, eating their own dogfood also means not using an iPhone.

You can eat two brands of dogfood.

Can you build native iOS apps in Flutter?

Yes. There's also icon "packs" that mimic the iOS style, and I believe you can use different icons for different builds between android and ios?

I wouldn't call it "native" when you bundle half an OS worth of libraries with your app, including one that draws the UI with OpenGL instead of using system anything.

I wouldn't call it "native" when you're running a sandboxed app on top of an immutable base system, but our goalposts tend to change pretty frequently in the arena of consumer electronics.

Nowadays folks like to call "hybrid app" as "native app". The bottomline is "native app" is what allowed to be listed on the "app store".

I think I've seen electron apps in macOS app store? And I've definitely seen all kinds of webview-based apps on google play.

Flutter is not native. They draw all the controls themselves, so there'll always be some difference between how the native platforms feels and how a Flutter app feels (due to small and not so small differences).

Their renderer is why I love and hate Flutter. It's so easy to become productive in Flutter, but the end result always feels off-brand on every platform.

I suppose the exception is the web, where React-based rendering and CSS resets have killed off most of the native feel anyway, but Flutter on the web is too slow to actually be usable in my experience. Yes, with a high powered laptop and a JS-optimized browser like Chrome it's acceptable, but that just shouldn't be necessary.

I can see Flutter have its advantages, like on Fuchsia where "native" isn't defined by anything else and on kiosk systems where the application is the only meaningful UI that'll ever be shown, but in apps I'm just generally annoyed by its seeming popularity.

I don't understand Google's relationship with Flutter. It's clearly not the basket they're putting most of their eggs in, but it got a pretty top spot in the I/O keynote this year, so it's not like they aren't putting weight behind it. I had some experiences with a Flutter app, and it's not a language or framework for me, but I for sure don't follow Google's logic in keeping it alive when they aren't super visibly using it themselves.

Most Google apps pre-date Flutter by far, and teams developing them (rightfully so) are not going to port them to Flutter.

Google is big enough to have both promoters and detractors of Flutter, and everything in between. They don't even need to choose one alternative either, they can bet on all horses in the race.

That‘s great news. I‘m guessing big apps like Maps and Youtube will become a lot nicer while the small ones will be mediocre Flutter versions.

Maybe youtube will finally get a “back” button on ios!

> I‘m guessing big apps like Maps and Youtube will become a lot nicer while the small ones will be mediocre Flutter versions

Flutter will undoubtedly adopt (and benefit from) this new UIKit-based Material Design implementation too.

I don‘t think it will, since flutter 100% bypasses UIKit and renders directly to pixels with Skia.

Dang! I'm sure you're right, then. I really want to like Flutter, but it just feels so unnatural.

Good to see they embrace that platform's own conventions instead of forcing their own.

UI consistency is nice, but the reduced design space is also kinda boring. I guess balancing a unified look while keeping enough freedom for developers to express their ideas is a pretty hard job for the toolkit designers.

Developer here. I can confirm that it’s harder and more time/effort-expensive to build a UI framework or design system or custom component than using existing ones. I absolutely abhor working with designers who think that software design is about the freedom of expression of their personal creativities and tastes instead of the pragmatic, simple execution of fulfilling a business need both for the business and the customers.

Design systems should not exist in a silo. Design systems should be consistent across a platform, so if you want to practice your freedom of expression, make your own platform. Or, design a website, where there are hardly any constraints.

Good riddance, I find Google apps on both my iPhone and AppleTV quite annoying because their use of MD makes them different to use compared to everything else on those platforms.

The YouTube tvOS App feels particularly egregious to me, its video playback controls seem to behave nothing like all the other installed tvOS video apps that I use (Netflix, Plex, and AppleTV).

It's not you. YouTube on Android's previous and next video buttons are where every other video app puts +10 and -10 seconds. When you go to the next video sometimes there is no obvious way back.

I've never had that problem, to be honest. If I recall correctly, Google's next/previous predates the ±10 seconds buttons that have become popular these days.

Youtube has the double tap gesture which I actually miss in all other video apps that only have special buttons for it.

Good news!

Fuck Google:

• YouTube has deliberately crippled Picture-in-Picture and background audio on iPad/iOS for years, but apparently not on some Android phones.

• YouTube has AutoPlay (next video) but no Auto-Repeat. What the fuck?

• On iPhone, Google.com has Dark Mode option (without signing in) only when you Request Desktop Website, but viewing the default mobile site has no option Dark Mode.

• Google apps try to hijack voice dictation to their own servers instead of using the built-in iOS dictation.

• Signing into any Google app will also forcibly sign you into Google Search on Safari. You have to manually delete Google cookies to sign out of Search but remain signed in on the YouTube app, for example.

• iOS/iPadOS features like Dark Mode and Split View still not fully supported in some apps.

• “SafeSearch” (censorship) cannot be disabled in some countries (at least not without signing in, allowing your search terms to be associated with your account).

Really. Why do the biggest companies struggle so much with such basic UX issues? Serious question.

because iOS is considered a second-class citizen compared to native Android devices during development?

Great! It was never a sensible choice to use foreign-looking design on iOS.

Now, if only every other company in the world would do the inverse and stop using iOS-style design on android, which I consider to be a much more prevalent issue.

I don't actually like Material Design very much, but it isn't as if I like Apple's iOS 7+ "flat" design either (though it has at least gotten better over the years). I think having consistent mechanics is not only useful but "very important", but I also never felt like Google's apps on iOS were particularly "alien": they seem to be using the built-in scroll views (I have a somewhat low tolerance for this, but I honestly am not "super picky" about subtle things that could be different... I have friends who are designers who turn up their noses at a control of weird corner cases that feel like bugs aren't clearly exactly the Apple control, which I think is ridiculously snobby) and their overall layout feels like any other mobile app.

I do hate hate hate the Google Docs app, but it isn't because of Material Design: it is because the concept of how the app thinks of editing mode vs. viewing mode is extremely confusing, and I always manage to end up dismissing the very button I need to access the editing mode in my quest to enter the editing mode. (I also often end up adding a comment by accident and my attempts to cancel the comment pass through some workflow where I cancel the cancellation of my comment... I feel like this entire concept of double-cancel is insane.) But they would almost certainly make that app just as difficult to use with any widget set.

But the actual design of say, the YouTube app? It is fine. To be clear: I hate it when an app sucks... I am ultra-picky about fine details in products involving the spacing and alignment of widgets, and I find that almost all "bespoke UI" truly pisses me off, as most designers frankly tend to suck at coming up with good components that make sense in context (and then the engineer that builds them tends to fail to push back on them sufficient and you get a cluttered and disorganized mess). But it isn't because I am being snobby about "it has to be an Apple control or I won't accept it": it is because I know a lot of typography (which itself is probably more than a normal user, who wouldn't even care about spacing and alignment!). And seriously: that isn't the YouTube app, nor is it the Google Maps app.

And then, at the end of the day, you have to ask whether the vast majority of people with an iPhone are even using Apple's own apps very often. I appreciate some people do; the person reading my comment in anger right now is likely thinking "I DOO!!". But seriously, now: how much time do you think a normal user is using their phone to use Facebook or TikTok or Twitter (which I bet you don't use at all and claim these are horrible apps for horrible people who don't know better, yadda yadda) vs. literally the entire rest of their lives, mess less using the Apple apps?

I use Safari (though I wouldn't if I felt I had actual choice... "thanks, Apple" :/), but it doesn't use the standard iOS app bar controls either ;P. Other than that, I still use Messages a lot (though most of my friends gave up on iMessage long ago, and switched to WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger), Notes every few days, and the Phone app once a week or so; I go into the Settings app a lot, I guess, which feels weird, but it is what it is ;P. I used to use Camera a lot, but in addition to also being fully bespoke UI, I don't go outside anymore as all the events I go to are cancelled or virtual :( so I have nothing to take a picture of anymore) I am actually going outside today, but probably not many: I don't actually consider fleet week to sound like an exciting photo op).

I use Calendar, which uses normal iOS UI for the editing of stuff but then uses seemingly entirely bespoke UI--that I don't think is very good, BTW--for everything else. And hell: I think "normal" users don't use even the Calendar app, as 1) the only reason I am using shared calendars is because I have a fancy white-collared job, where other people insist on using calendars constantly with meetings they want to remotely manage, and 2) I am one of those rare weirdos (that are over-represented on Hacker News) that prefers to keep all my data locally and so I liked how the Calendar app was only on my phone... most everyone else I know uses Google Calendar, and I bet most non-tech people just go into the App Store to get the Google Calendar app to access it (I know the other fancy white-collared people I work with do this, because they are always confused at how my Apple Calendar renders stuff when I ask them questions, but I still believe fancy white-collared people are weird so this isn't a great data point).

But so then, for real: despite being "old" (almost 40) and "out of touch" (I don't ever post because I feel a bit weird doing so) even I use Facebook and TikTok and Twitter (oh and Instagram!) more than all of those Apple apps combined... and none of them seem to think Apple's stupid iOS 7+ navigation bars make any sense and so they all have something more similar to Material Design's app bar. I think this is a good thing; and, even if I didn't, I will claim I would have been unlikely to think about it much as these are the apps I--and I continue to bet most normal people, even way way more so than I--use most.

Let’s hope they adopt iOS performance and responsiveness as well.

That’s good for the consumer. Awesome

What about flutter apps?

Flutter apps can be themed, and a "cupertino" theme mimicking iOS Views exists.

It isn’t a theme per sae, really an alternate set of widgets: https://flutter.dev/docs/development/ui/widgets/cupertino

I have no doubt Google will not use iOS default GUI components. They will come up with some sort of abomination that superficially looks like the native iOS components but are off in every way when you look closely, like Qt does.

They already do that for Flutter with the Cupertino Widgets.

But … you have to pick widget per OS, not automagically rendered differently by OS

I was very surprised and disappointed when I discovered that. It didn't really felt cross platform anymore if for every component you need to do a platform check and render it differently. It sounds like flutter is more about having the same (custom or material) UI on both platforms and not having the framework do the "nativification" for you.

Doesn’t sound like this is the case from the linked Twitter thread: „App bars become UINavigationControllers. Standard controls just need light branded touches. Lists can align with modern UITableView and list-based collection view APIs. Menus are just UIMenus.“

My expectations mirror your own, but a few of Jeff's thoughts imply that they won't take this path:

> App bars become UINavigationControllers. Standard controls just need light branded touches. Lists can align with modern UITableView and list-based collection view APIs. Menus are just UIMenus.

> And the best code is often no code :)

> The time we're saving not building custom code is now invested in the long [...]

How is Qt off in every way?

If you can't see it, there’s no way I could ever convince you. The spacing, the sizes… all UI elements are slightly off in some way.

On which OS and compared to what? The OS’s native framework? I can believe that. But eg. on Linux, it is a native framework looking perfectly fine. And on Windows, their own native apps can look out of place in the intermix of 3 generations of “native” frameworks.

On every major OS except niche ones

Whatever they go with, the guaranteed outcome (due to being Google) is that they will do something else within a few years.

That always confused me, because I thought Apple had a policy where you couldn't visually replicate their native iOS components, else they would reject you from the App Store. However I haven't worked in iOS-land since around 2015; has that policy changed?

That policy never existed.

Nope. You can see a preview of what Jeff's talking about with iOS Chrome, which has already done its own iOS-ification (de-materialization?)

Also, the existing MDC components are already built on top of UIKit - things like MDCButton is a UIButton subclass (with a lot of stuff added on). Same for textfields, collectionview cells, etc. There's no from scratch reimplementation of Apple's UI components that I'm aware of, just extensions to make the Material design stuff happen.

Edited title is a bit sensationalized. Key elements of Material will still be important parts of the design system on iOS; it’s about acknowledging when the platform solution is sufficient for the intended purpose. I’m sure that there will still be gaps that need to be filled, but many don’t need custom solutions anymore :)

miss-labled, Google is not dropping MDC or MD for that matter.

This is an independent shop dropping MD

"Jeff Verkoeyen, staff engineering lead for Google Design on Apple platforms, on Twitter now:

This year my team shifted the open source Material components libraries for iOS into maintenance mode…

The time we’re saving not building custom code is now invested in the long tail of UX details that really make products feel great on Apple platforms. To paraphrase Lucas Pope, we’re “swimming in a sea of minor things”, and I couldn’t be more excited about this new direction."

Google Material Design is do bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com