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Comment by radicaldreamer | Hacker News Reader

Something strange has happened to Android... the UI/UX had pulled ahead prior to iOS 7, strengthened it's lead due to the buggy shitshow that persisted through iOS 9, but has recently taken huge steps back in terms of information density and hiding things behind notches for no apparent reason.

Has the team changed substantially? Has Google basically "won" in marketshare and has thrown in the towel? Is there something big coming where the resources are going to?

iOS continues to improve and refine the "total user experience", especially if you're in Apple's multi-device ecosystem but Android feels like it is stagnating in a significant way for the last 2-3 years.

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Honestly, I think you're just biased. We all are.

A few months ago I was reading some article which mentioned a common feature on iOS that I didn't even know existed and realized I had been away from the Apple ecosystem for too long. Given iOS's market share and influence, I decided I better catch up and bought an iPhone 13 for my next upgrade, complete with Apple Watch.

I hope this isn't too much of a cop-out, but there are pros and cons to each platform, but both are pretty amazing. We're at the point where we're really comparing subtleties, habits and personal preference. I miss some things on Android and wish Android had some things from iOS. You get a bunch of paper cuts on each platform. I won't list out my personal pet peeves, because they're just that.

After I've absorbed what there is to learn from Apple (I'll probably get an iPad to complete the set), I'll definitely be going back to my Samsung. I personally prefer Android.

I also own a Pixel Pro for testing, and that thing is a buggy disaster, but that's a different conversation.

Full-time designers gotta justify their jobs somehow.

We need to find a way to move on, once something is perfected. Because if we don't we kinda ruin what we have already perfected. It's called planned obsolescence and below are some resources on the same. It is widely used across industries for over a century and kinda plays a huge role in climate change.

Veritasium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE

DW (mostly about phone) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aYJPonRJd8

The problem lies deeper. There's only so much work that the humanity legitimately needs done, but the economy is built upon the assumption that everyone can get a job. So we end up creating jobs the society at large doesn't actually benefit from to make sure every person has to do some work to earn money to live. This includes ballooning IT companies about which you can't help but keep asking "where does enough work even come from to occupy all these people, in a product that's essentially finished".

I don't know how to even approach solving this.

Further reading - The Rise of Bullshit Jobs https://jacobin.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-work...

The solution is both simultaneously simple, yet incredibly nuanced and socially complex: UBI.

And because universal basic income is so nuanced and socially complex, I feel like this problem is here to stay until we reach post-scarcity, if we ever do.

Exactly. That's without even considering a botched rollout of UBI causing inflation and inequality like we've never known before.

Iterating design after success to make it worse isn't the same thing as planned obsolescence.

> We need to find a way to move on, once something is perfected

The GUI/UI/UX on Android is so close to perfection like a zygote is close to a human being.

With Android 12 they introduced Material Design 3, the latest iteration of the design system used by Android and other Google products. Their designers haven't even bothered to publish a proper and usable spec this time, but Google marketed it as production ready in blog posts, Google I/O talks and press releases.

The published Material Design 3 spec is missing several basic components, it doesn't even have a checkbox. Google is inviting developers to migrate to the latest version of the design system, while their own teams at Angular and Flutter are now mixing M2 and M3 components and design concepts, and hitting roadblocks because of incompatible elevation and typography changes in certain components.

https://m3.material.io

> it doesn't even have a checkbox

This seems to be intentional. It has a switch component. You don't need a checkbox and a switch.

It isn't intentional, the official implementations of M3 include a new checkbox.

This is one of the posts I wish I could upvote more than once.

I used both and am baffled by your experience. In my experience Android has been a complete glitch hell only being somewhat fixed since Android 12 (still flawed but it's a huge push) while iOS has always managed to at least be half decent in that regard. iOS7 was a few steps back but they managed to come back pretty quickly.

I agree about information density. Manufacturer makes the screen larger to fit more content, Android makes elements larger to fit fewer controls (this is not just a "ppi problem", the layouts all seem to be designed for 3" screens, yet none of them exist).

iOS/Apple has mostly been good about density, but they too keep being tempted by their large screens to make UI elements unnecessarily large.

I've been on Pixel devices since the 2 XL and other Androids since the Nexus one. For me, Android 12 was the biggest regression that I've ever seen in one major Android update.

The bugs were massive and glaring in the early days. Things as simple as getting a notification would sometimes completely blank the rest of the screen. Since then, random slowdowns and slow animations have only gotten worse.

Beyond the core platform, Google's apps (which feel like an extension of the core) are just getting worse too. Android Auto for phones has been replaced with a terrible driving mode implementation. I recently used voice search to open an audio app in driving mode. It helpfully opened the app on my tv at home instead of the phone that was in driving mode miles away from home.

Everything is more disjointed and less functional than before. The little helpful four icons at the top of the app drawer? That was an amazing feature a few years ago. It'd always highlight one of the ones that I was about to use. Now, it fails 100% of the time, no matter how obvious it should be.

Things that used to be easy to do with the notification shade are now more confusing and take more steps than ever before. Its an awful mess, and this is literally the first time that I've preferred ios on my ipad over the Android UI.

Fascinating how different experiences can be. The changes of Android 12 are what kept me from switching to iOS (even if I disagree with some of the paradigms, transitions are finally only glitchy something like 20% of the time instead of approximately every time).

yeah I really can't fathom how the material design won out. it's so.... gimmicky. like when you click a button, and it radiates out a ripple across the button surface.

Agreed. I am implementing some portions of it right now for an app and some of it is so eye-rolley. I'm just skipping those bits.

Overall, I think it's a nice guide, especially for people like me who are design-inclined but not designers. However it shouldn't be taken as gospel.

I don't want information density, I want a reliable and secure communication device. Sometimes less is more.

Leetcode hiring practices is what I'm thinking.

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