Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think the idea is that there are ready-made toolkits for Material that will give you the same design across iOS, Android, and web, and so if it's easy to develop in, why not use them? As a startup founder, I have to say it makes a lot of sense. My core competency is finding & serving my own market, I don't have time to wrestle with designing for 3 platforms.

I'm guessing that the strategic advantage is to cut off Apple's knees. Apple's key differentiator has been design; this filters down into all the apps written for their platform, so that consumers say they choose iOS "because the apps are better-designed". Google wants a critical mass of iOS & web developers to choose Material instead, and make the Material design good enough that users won't prefer native iOS apps over Material apps. Then iOS becomes a fragmented mess of native, Material, and Cordova/PhoneGap apps, while Android is all unified Material design down to the OS, and mobile websites just look like Android.

IMHO it's brilliant strategically, though it's kinda dick-ish toward Apple. There are a couple huge unknowns though, like whether startup founders will adapt Material, whether those that do become large mobile successes, and whether Apple will even allow Material apps into the app store (they've been known to ban PhoneGap apps before for not following native look & feel guidelines).

I've got a couple of personal projects I've been in the planning stages for, and I decided that it was worth my time to get familiar with Material. I don't think it's too much trouble to have applications behave in consistent ways. One of the things that drives me nuts in the desktop app space is when I hit the 'x' to close a window, and instead it minimizes an application to the system tray. I was going to take the weekend off of designing and planning, but instead I'm going to be neck deep in layouts. :)

Yikes! Its embrace/extend/extinguish applied to design, and we just hit extend :-)

Frankly though, I can't see any of your huge unknowns ever coming to pass. Almost all startup founders and designers I know use iPhones. Many still have trouble understanding why they should pay attention to Android design at all. If material ever does start to pick up momentum on iOS I can see Apple wielding the ban hammer liberally. Everything they have done in the past shows they are not shy about removing apps they feel aren't in Apple's best interests.

There is no way google, or anyone, could accomplish the extinguish phase of an eee operation against design.

Ah - I think perhaps what I meant wasn't clear. Its not against design - its against Apple. The medium the attack is conducted in is design.

Also, because this is the internet and tone doesn't come through very well, my comment is meant to be a bit tongue in cheek. I think the idea that google wants to conduct eee against Apple using design is just a little too far fetched, though there may be a tiny grain of truth in there somewhere.

Presumably the end purpose of design is differentiation. Whatever Google is trying to do, Google has borrowed heavily on flat UIs other designers have been producing for some time. Rather than leading the pack, 'Material' is getting all of the stragglers to catch up. If all cars looked like Ferraris, Ferrari would change.

Unless Google ports their UI framework to iOS, I don't see how iOS developers will use Material.

I thought that part of the I/O announcement was a toolkit/SDK for iOS that incorporated the Material design? I could be wrong, I just recall reading it in a HN comment and can't find mentions on the web now, but it's the logical way to get the look & feel onto iOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com