Differences Between iOS and Android Mastodon Clients | Hacker News Reader

Differences Between iOS and Android Mastodon Clients

daringfireball.net

31 pointscompiler-guy18 comments

> None of the Android clients scroll fluidly, none offer swipe gestures, and only Tooot seems to offer a tap-and-hold contextual menu

While I think you could argue swipe gestures either way, and tap-and-hold is more of a thing on iOS than Android in general, I wonder what's going on with the scrolling. Every Mastodon client I've used on iOS, on not-exactly-the-latest hardware, scrolls smoothly in almost all cases. Is this just easier to do on iOS than modern Android? (The last time I went near development for either was close to a decade ago, and at that time it was certainly easier on iOS, but I would have assumed this would have been resolved.)

In my observations developing for both platforms, native iOS devs are more likely to take the "correct" well-supported "happy path" for every task where such a thing exists. This often makes for an overall smoother final result.

In contrast this is much less typical in Android dev. There are far fewer "happy paths" in the first place thanks to Google's inability to focus on anything, and even where these paths do exist many devs don't bother following them and just do whatever so long as it technically runs.

It is interesting this. I moved from Blackberry to Android to iOS and found that quality of the apps in general in iOS just so much better. I guess the fact that more people pay for apps in iOS means it is worth making the investment, but I also wonder if the different emphasis on the platforms influences which developers work on which one.

> None of these Android clients would garner any attention at all on iOS

Probably because these are open source? iOS developers won't get out of bed to write something unless it's worth their 70%.

> Everything feels like a hobby app because everything is.

My guy, when people tried taking commercially viable Twitter clients seriously, look at what happened.

> Probably because these are open source?

Of the four iOS clients he names (Ice Cubes, Tusker, Ivory, Mammoth), Ice Cubes and Tusker are open source.

Interesting, as far as I can tell both of those apps look less feature-complete than Tusky. Still, thank you for bringing them to my attention.

Features aren’t a good indicator for software quality. I think that’s the point Gruber was trying to make when he linked to the big feature checklist.

If so, then his argument boils down to "I don't like Material design", which is fine. It's also subjective though, and as long as Tusky is both feature-complete and intuitive then I don't see how it's a bad Android app.

Janky scrolling isn’t part of material design. It’s all about the crappy UX of Android Mastadon clients. Features aren’t lacking. Polish and craftsmanship is.

I'm not sure what they're talking about. Tusky feels no different than scrolling in Safari, minus the elastic scrolling at the side of pages.

After noticing someone else wrote a very similar article on an RSS reader on Android the day before, John posted a new article today. It included this:

> One thing I learned long ago is that people who prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can empathize with and understand the choices made by people who prioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability to tinker with their software at the system level, or software being free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most people who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares deeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it.

I’m curious what you think of it. I’m not trying to imply you’re in ether category.

This reminds me of mirror-universe conversations I've had with executives about developer experience for APIs. If an API functions and is technically capable of performing all of the operations that are business-critical, it works and is good; why complain? "Developer Experience" is just a fluffy, hand-wavey kind of mysticism that's so subjective no one can be expected to care about it!

And yet.

They're both pretty new.; Tusky's been around for five years. I think it's certainly fair to say that Android _did_ have a better open source landscape than iOS for Mastodon until lately (I think on iOS it was mostly just the official client).

It has absolutely exploded since December or so, slightly before the Twitter 3rd party client shutdown.

I find this hard to believe. Has Gruber missed some great Mastodon client?

Can you suggest one? He did indeed ask people on Mastodon, I remember seeing it. I would think those users would be the most likely to know.

I just use a web browser

Because you prefer it to the available apps? Or are you the kind of person who always prefers to use the web over an app if given the choice?

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