Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
>But more broadly they all just look and especially feel inert and rigid. Nothing shrinks or stretches. There’s no life to them.
I've been disabling animations on my phone for a few months now, and oh boy. Give me more of that dead, lifeless feel please.
It's so much faster, and it makes my phone into more of a tool rather than a fancy toy that sometimes gets in my way for no discernible reason or benefit.
I get why life-full things are popular, but it's increasingly smelling like a form of addiction-feeding to me.
Also UI design still hasn't recovered from the absurdities that excessively flat, whitespace-heavy nonsense forced on the world. It's slowly regaining sanity, but I'm kinda glad there are a mountain of Android apps that have not followed along.
Author calls these apps "brutalist" and leaves it at that. To his credit, he does list three features that he's like to see: fluid scrolling, swipe gestures, and tap-and-hold contextual menus. Fine. But then goes on to describe his feelings "inert and rigid". Then "comfort, fun, and panache". What on earth is he asking for out of these apps? How do you objectively compare one app's "panache" with another? If I was a developer, what are the steps I can follow to program some "comfort" into my app? These complaints seem so wishy-washy and underspecified.
Then he leaves with the Kubrick quote: “Sometimes the truth of a thing isn’t in the think of it, but in the feel of it.” We're fully in the realm of mysticism now, this is not an attempt to fairly compare or measure anything.
Or a four star Michelin restaurant vs. a Mall food court, or all art/entertainment reviews?
Seems like it's really common to compare things in ways that aren't objectively measurable?
If you don’t think apps can be artistic works, it’s no wonder you don’t understand what I’m trying to express.
If it were a video game or movie, then sure, subjective comparisons of the media content would make more sense. Does the plot make sense? Are the characters likable? But then, it's just one reviewer's opinion vs. another's rather than actionable measures of quality.
I'm looking at the article from the point of view of the developer accepting criticism and wanting to take corrective action. If I released a utility application and a reviewer told me [not your words, but for example] it felt cold and without pizazz, and it didn't zing and pop and it wasn't sleek enough, I wouldn't know what to do to fix this.
The point of the piece is that there are developers that would know what to do with that feedback, and for whatever reason more of those developers develop for iOS than Android.
Having worked in both platforms I can say their conclusions are demonstrably false, if not outright biased.
/s
for real - i'd rather have a 'brutalist' mastadon client that cannot be removed by Google than 100 pretty mastadon clients that will be blocked permanently from the iOS store the next time a mass shooting occurs.
He's also been showing his age quite a bit, being against a lot of recent developments, like being anti-remote work.
I don’t remember that at all. Can you provide a link?
No remote work for anyone: bad policy.
Everyone on every team can work remote: sometimes a bad policy.
That’s my position. A lot of people who strongly feel they should always have the option of full-time remote work object to that.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but where is your proof of this? Everyone worked remotely for 2 years and we all made money.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/06/04/apple-remote-wo...
>> But more broadly they all just look and especially feel inert and rigid. Nothing shrinks or stretches. There’s no life to them.
I can see this two ways: some people WANT to be entertained by the UI when they're surfing. Others like myself, don't want extraneous distractions. The UI should be secondary to the information.
The second quote on the developer choosing OSX over Windows, is quite interesting. I would think that an application developer, being even more into their craft, would eventually want LESS interference from the device UI, to where they would become platform agnostic and roll their own "life" into the application's UI.
As far as developer choice goes, that's going to depend on what gets that particular individual fired up. Personally speaking, it's the possibility to produce something that's both polished and thoughtful on top of being highly functional. For me a project where the human interface is to be phoned in sounds like a miserable slog.
> Things like fluid scrolling...
Well, yeah. It's not exactly apples to Apples to compare your 2022 iPhone to an Android phone from 2019. On my Z-Flip 4, Tusky has no problem hitting 120Hz scroll.
That being said, I can't disagree with his larger point when it comes to many commercial apps - design teams are all iOS and ship designs that aren't Android-first or even Android-adjacent. Android developers often end up fighting (and losing) to design teams which only care about one platform
I kind of disagree. If you can't make a UI run fluidly on a phone from 4 years ago, you might be doing it wrong. UIs have tight timing budgets, true, but computers are _plenty_ fast enough to keep up. Android has more overhead than iOS and it shows.
I put up with Android because I can run my own code on my own hardware. But I'm increasingly looking at iOS favorably.
The iPhone was 60 Hz until the 13 in 2021. It still felt perfectly smooth.
That said, as the sibling comment notes, swipe gestures and context menus aren't too bad to implement on Android. Like Gruber says, it's a cultural difference. For whatever reason it just doesn't strike the average Android dev that these features might be desirable.
My data, on an app with 100k MAU, iOS makes 3x on subscriptions AND ads, despite Android having 3x the userbase.
On Android the default experience already has faster animations than iOS, and you can tweak them to run quicker which makes it feel like a device that is interested in getting me to the things I want rather than one that wants to show off. And the scrolling on a $500-600 phone (Pixel 7) is much smoother than on a similarly-priced iPhone (90 vs 60Hz). And use real uBlock Origin. It's so much nicer.
We clearly prioritize very different things in life.
Anyway, I'm a happy user of Tusky. It has all the features I want, and while the UI looks dated it's not at all hard to use. I'm in fact probably happier with a Tusky-style UI than overly-animated whitespace-filled configuration-free apps made by big companies that I also use (and look "prettier").
And yes:
> Android seems to be the platform for people who consider this comprehensive feature checklist to be a helpful resource evaluating which apps they should try
I do find such checklists helpful, since I care about the functionality of apps I use. Maybe Gruber should just let people enjoy things?
How is his criticism not letting people enjoy things? You’re welcome to enjoy it and also welcome to not read John Gruber if reading him lessens your enjoyment. And he’s welcome to criticize. Maybe he enjoys criticizing. Maybe you should let John Gruber enjoy criticizing?
Some criticism is healthy. He’s criticizing dated UIs. You even agree with him. You said of the same app as him “…the UI looks dated…” Maybe this will spur some app developers to improve their UIs which will cause people to enjoy things even more.
You may not think Gruber's criticisms are legitimate, but I, and many others, do, and he's not criticizing the people who enjoy the Android apps.
Apple is interesting in that they don't try to be everything for all people. They find a niche (usually a very profitable one) where they can execute better than the competition and they don't try to eat the whole pie. What other tech companies are like that? Nintendo?
It does seem like a nice feature. But “nobody would put up with it” is pretty hyperbolic.
All it should do is enable Android to have even more good apps.
So when both platforms are capable of making an app, such as Mastodon, why does the disparity exist?
I explained why. For an app with few users, it sometimes takes longer for open source to catch up.
> All it should do is enable Android to have even more good apps
And it does. It has far more and far better apps than iOS (maps with navigation long before iOS, ReVanced, better voice assistants, driving mode apps, better in-call abilities, better keyboards, better system-wide adblockers, better Firefox and Chrome, better GeForce Now, better BitTorrent apps, and on and on). Just not this cherry-picked example to Gruber's UI taste.
Android apps have been available since before 2010. Time has been available.
But it’s so hard to get recommendations of high quality Android apps that aren’t something Apple doesn’t allow (call recorder, web browser, etc.). That’s a great category, but I still struggle to see why that’s all anyone can point to.
Paid, free, IAP, open-source, anything.
And I gave you a list of applications that are indeed far superior on Android. Gruber cherry-picked a Mastodon app, which hasn't been available since 2010 and hasn't had many users improving it.
> But it’s so hard to get recommendations of high quality Android apps that aren’t something Apple doesn’t allow
Several of my examples pass that criterion.
It feels like these 10 years later, we should have some some pretty solid intuitions about how much of a competitive advantage this actually is for iOS.
To be clear, I think that the availability of niche apps is some kind of competitive advantage for iOS. But not a particularly big one, and probably less of one now than it was a decade ago.
The recent rise of iOS market share in the US probably has a lot to do with the wealth spike created by the pandemic, which advantages a marginally more expensive product. The other place I'd look is iPhone cameras vs Galaxy cameras, though honestly I'm not sure how good Galaxy's cameras are since I don't like Samsung's Android dialect.
It's not just niche apps, though, as you put it.
For instance, for years (might still actually be the case depending on phone model), creators complained about Instagram having terrible image quality on Android for content creation. Apparently the app was just screenshotting the camera view finder, instead of pulling the actual camera feed. Obviously on iPhone it's using the real camera data, delivering the expected image quality.
That isn't a niche app. That's freaking Instagram. But that kind of story is fairly common place--developers take the time to get their apps right on iOS, because it's actually worth the time. People with iPhones spend more money and thus drive more advertising revenue. Android ends up with a second rate version of the app that's given less investment but actually has more devices to optimize for. With those constraints, it's just a natural result to end up with a lower quality app experience.
Small developers may indeed find it too onerous to deal with the many devices and software versions of Android. For a small it even mid-sized shop, there are possibly opportunity costs to trying to make a first-class Android app that generally makes it hard to deliver optimized versions of it.
Instagram, on the other hand, is not in that situation. Their reach is easily broad enough to hire another 10 or 20 Android engineers and tell them to optimize the app. Any lift at all in Instagram's Android numbers would be sufficient to make that business case.
If they aren't doing that, it's evidence that nobody actually cares about this kind of app quality. No mid-level Facebook manager was able to justify a bigger team by saying, "from an addressable market of hundreds of millions in high-income countries alone, we can get a lift of a few million dollars by optimizing our app."
I don't find your argument persuasive.
If there was an ROI to building a better Android experience, don't you think major corporations would do it? You're right that Meta has the resources to do better. It's a pretty searing indictment of the Android ecosystem that they don't.
> If they aren't doing that, it's evidence that nobody actually cares about this kind of app quality.
Maybe it's evidence that the people who do care went and bought an iPhone already. Isn't this a problem for Android? Do they only want to cater to people who are willing to suffer substandard app experiences?
Developers are by and large doing the work you say nobody cares about on iOS. It's apparently worth it there. Why aren't developers willing to put in the same level of effort on Android? If nobody actually cared I'd expect the user experience to be equally subpar across platforms but that's repeatedly proven to not be the case.
But the fact is, Android has plenty of market share. Even if half of Android users are weirdos who don't care about this objectively important thing (with the rest of the normal people migrating to iOS), it would still have positive ROI to build this objectively important thing for the people who care about this objectively important thing, but are on Android for whatever other reasons.
The way to square this circle is say, "Actually, it turns out that this thing isn't objectively important. Maybe a small population cares about it a lot, but most don't."
Which is, in fact, what I've been saying.
This has the benefit of also squaring with the rest of the evidence.
The point you're missing is that not all market share is created equal in terms of revenue potential. There could be absolute billions of users on Android but it doesn't really matter if they're unwilling to pay for anything. And that's largely been the case--it's well documented at this point that iOS users are vastly more willing to spend money on apps by practically a 2:1 margin, and generally have a higher net-worth that advertisers like to target. [1]
So since this is inherently about the ROI, it frankly doesn't even matter if Android users do care about the user experience as much as iOS users do. Objectively Meta (or any company) is not going to throw investment at a platform that doesn't pay it back at a rate competitive with iOS. Like this just makes sense. Sure, you could maybe goose ROI on Android with some better investment, but if you'd make more back applying those same resources to your iOS team then it's a pretty open and shut case, right?
And so that's how we end up in a place where users have to choose what matters to them. And on balance Android has a lot of other things going for it that might be more important for a lot of people. But to me general app quality does make sense as part of the explanation for iOS market share increasing during a time of free-flowing stimulus checks, as you pointed out. If you have some extra money to splurge, it might make a lot of sense to buy that more expensive iPhone that delivers a better app experience. These things can move the needle--that's the competitive advantage I'm talking about.
For me at least, it's certainly an important part of the calculus.
[1] - https://www.netguru.com/blog/iphone-vs-android-users-differe...
Yes, Android users monetize less than iOS users. And if you're a small shop whose apps reach, I dunno, 100,000 users (or 1M, or even 10M), and your Android users are around half the users but let's say 20% of your revenue base, then maybe it doesn't make sense to chase marginal improvements to your Android revenue.
But Instagram has 1B MAUs or so and $40B in annual revenue. Even if Android users are only 20% of its revenue base, chasing incremental improvements in that amount of revenue ($8B) is absolutely worth hiring 10-20 Android engineers and having them focus on that improvement -- if improving that feature actually engages more users. It's an easy case to make.
Where in my experience Android fares poorly is in a certain kind of ambition. Part of my beat is apps coverage. I was relieved when an article I used to write was canned because it was a nightmare each month coming up with consumer/creative oriented quality apps on Android. (Things are getting tougher on iOS there, too, but it’s still ahead.)
Even in that space, there are quality apps on Android, and surprises do happen. LumaFusion is a good example of that – even if it showed up years after it had been on iOS. But in these sorts of premium app spaces – media creation; writing tools; cameras; children’s apps; even games – iOS remains ahead.
For most, that won’t make any odds. But for some, it’s the difference that matters.
>> One of the reasons I develop for OS X is that, when it comes to user interface, this is the big leagues, this is the show.
What?
For some evidence of design’s importance on the Mac (and now iOS), Apple has been awarding Apple Design Awards for many, many years. Winning one is considered by Mac/iOS designers and developers to be a high honor. I’m aware of no equivalent for Windows or Android.