23 ms·

Android can be beautiful

384 points by mephju 14y ago

jtreminio 14y ago
Some more themes are on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/androidthemes/ http://www.reddit.com/r/androidthemes/
- tvon 14y ago
  These (in TFA) are app screenshots, not themes.
micheljansen 14y ago
Some of these are really nice. I'm curious how many of these are Android-specific though. Path looks pretty similar on iOS and so do FourSquare, Flipboard etc. Which of these are examples of good mobile design that holds itself on various platforms (iOS, Android etc.) and which are unique to Android?
- mtgx 14y ago
  Some of them definitely use the Holo UI style, while others use their own non-holo/non-iOS style, although I wouldn't know if they use the same one for their iOS apps, too.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Caballera 14y ago
  Most of them look like their iOS counterparts. For example Catch Note's 'home' screen looks the same on Android as it does on iOS. Same with Flight Track Free and Feedly. Pintrest is more or less the same, with a slightly adjusted menu.
- aschobel 14y ago
  Co-founder of Catch here, some context; we launched our first Android app in 2008 and have about 10x as many users on there as we do on iOS. The issue we've seen is that people build an iOS app and then port it over to Android. We designed Catch 5.0 apps for Android and iPhone in parallel. This let us keep consistency between the platforms when it made sense, but also let us tweak the design early on so it could take advantage things unique to the platform, e.g. Action Bar on Android. The team is incredibly proud of this release, and it is nice to see folks taking notice. Both Google and Apple have also featured this release, everybody is beaming here. =)
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Path is gorgeous on Android, I like to just look at it. I just wish I had more than one friend actually using it. Heh.
rprasad 14y ago
This site contains a stack overflow bug which crashes Firefox and IE9 on Windows. Flagged.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Works fine on Firefox on Ubuntu.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Works fine in Chrome.
- RandallBrown 14y ago
  Works fine for me in IE9 and Firefox on Windows.
- conradfr 14y ago
  Yep my Firefox (on Win64) had a hard time loading it and became very slow, Chrome was fine.
- rprasad 14y ago
  UPDATE -- Revisited the site and it no longer crashes Firefox or IE9 on Windows. Unflagged. Now that I can see the examples, they are actually pretty decent.
seunghomattyang 14y ago
Reminds me of what Chief Creative Officer at doubleTwist said about designing for Android: >> As it stands, If you design a great app for Android and people say 'hey, that looks like an Android app', that means you've failed.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/sdw/status/187245772205600769 https://twitter.com/sdw/status/187245772205600769
- rradu 14y ago
  I don't think that's true. Some of these apps use elements from the Holo UI themes that are distinctly Android, and still look beautiful.
- verganileonardo 14y ago
  Before Android 4.0, yes. The new UI is beautiful.
zobzu 14y ago
is it bad if i find it inconsistent, annoying to use, etc? I mean, it is pretty (well, arguably, most of them are), but, the buttons are all over the place and everyone seems to have it's own UI plastered on top of more or less "android ui compliant" stuff.
- angryasian 14y ago
  the inconsistencies are usually defined by the developers. As you can see most these apps are available to the ios store as well. So its really not fair to judge the platform vs the developers.
- mephju 14y ago
  I think nobody would have a problem using any of these apps. Most of them even implement some kind of action bar so you totally know where to look for your user controls.
- KirinDave 14y ago
  This is a complaint about Mobile in general, not Android. People bitch about fragmentation (and it is a bit painful), but in the regard of "everyone has their own UX on top of the system default" iOS is in exactly as bad a boat, if not worse. Some of the most popular iOS apps take their UX off in crazy directions (a common example: Tweetbot). Look closely though. You'll notice the ActionBar is extremely prevalent in these. The ActionBar is actually one of those few Android teachable moments; I wish Apple did this as well, as consistently, or as themably. I've used a lot of these apps (and I am sad to not see Pattrn up there!) and it's very much the case that they have a fairly consistent set of "touch semantics" that screenshots don't reveal. E.g., Tap upper right corner to configure; long press for edit; swipe horizontally to navigate; long press on text fields to engage c/p editor bar. For better or worse, Android's toolkits offer a lot more guidance to the programmer on "the right way" than Apple's do (a great example of this that bleeds into UI is how Android has a ton of Loader patterns and iOS doesn't have anything nearly so sophisticated in its core lib). So in some respects, Android is actually slightly better off; the bigger toolkit means you get some superior consistency. The recent iterations (and backported support) framework strongly encourages you to do things like support long presses and swipe navigation and backpane navigation.
dpark 14y ago
These seem really inconsistent to me. Feedly looks almost like a metro (sorry, "Windows 8-style") app. doubleTwist looks like an iOS app, as do Square Card Reader and Tumblr. Reddit Sync Pro seems to fit in with Google+, so I assume that's what modern Android apps are supposed to look like. None of these general aesthetics are bad, but the inconsistency seems to be an issue. (Actually, a few of them do look bad to me, like Rdio, with the very dated "app home screen" that looks like it was copied from the old Facebook iOS app.)
- pkulak 14y ago
  Android doesn't have as much "drag and drop" as iOS. For example, you can't add a tab bar at the bottom, nav bar at the top, table view in the middle, set the text of each cell in the table view, and have an app that looks complete and looks like a stock Apple app. If you do that with Android you're just going to have a flat black screen with lines of text crammed next to each other with 0px of spacing. You really have to do _all_ your own design with Android. That tends to lead to more inconsistency, but more originality as well. Besides, when each app takes up all available real estate, do you really need consistency between apps? Distinctive styles are just a nice reminder of what app you're in.
  - niho 14y ago
    It's not (only) about the consistency of visual style. It's about the the consistency of interaction.
    - KirinDave 14y ago
      But this is not a problem Android has when apps target 4.0. The ActionBar has been a huge stabilizing influence on the Android interaction pattern; strongly enforcing backpaning, swipe-to-navigate, and consistent locations for navigation. I'm not sure why you'd say this. Android actually hasn't suffered from tactile UI fragmentation much more than iOS has.
      - dpark 14y ago
recoiledsnake 14y ago
Looks somewhat inspired by Metro... not that that's a bad thing. ICS made a huge stride in the Android UI, and Google was even talking up the new font during the announcement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f92ptAjm3I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f92ptAjm3I http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f17ujh98k-U http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f...
untog 14y ago
Since ICS, Android is beautiful. Well, the OS core is, anyway. Widget makers and the like still don't seem to have got the design memo, but I suspect that's because design talents are so focused on iOS. We just need the app makers to catch up. Foursquare, for instance, has been redesigned and looks great. However, their widgets haven't been touched and look awful by comparison. Spotify has done a far better job of updating everything at once.
- koko775 14y ago
  It's not because design talents are focused on iOS, it's that design talents are focused on the Android users that are worth targeting. Namely, people on 2.1 or 2.2+. Android generally monetizes/converts worse than iOS, so those who want a presence on Android can't afford to take advantage of any of the new stuff until old devices are retired sufficiently to make the tradeoff really worth it. It's been really tough to see all of the improvements, because Google is addressing user upgrades so poorly (even though the fault lies mostly with the manufacturers) that the upgrade problem is such a big deal for developers.
  - untog 14y ago
    Not true, actually. Google has released a compatibility library to allow developers to target old versions: http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.html http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.ht... So older Android versions can use modern apps. Both the examples I gave (Foursquare, Spotify) work with both newer and older versions.
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      There are some pretty gaping holes in the compatibility library. Luckily the most important of these (ActionBar support) is covered by a great 3rd party library (ActionBarSherlock). If anything, I think the existence of the compatibility library and ABS show that Google is dropping the ball a bit on the core Android framework. Why even have these be extra (and in one case 3rd party) libraries? Where possible why not just write the core SDK in a way such that it can fall back to 1.6 or 2.2 without having to worry about fiddling with compatibility libraries?
tvon 14y ago
There are some very nice looking apps in there. Kind of meta but IMO the screenshots on that site are too big and should be scaled down a bit.
- bmunro 14y ago
  There is a size selector on the left. S M L XL The XL is the actual size (pixel-wise) that you would see on a phone such as the Galaxy Nexus.
squarecat 14y ago
Beautiful != usable
- dictum 14y ago
  Two attributes that are not mutually exclusive.
se85 14y ago
Beautiful != Consistency
koffiezet 14y ago
The problem with the Android UI isn't (only) the lack of beauty, it's the lack of consistency, style and attention to detail. Things like included/used fonts (although the default iOS notes app also fails horribly here), placement of back buttons. And that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the Android UI, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing. In iOS the 'back' button is always on the same location AND tells you where you're going back to. Android has a dedicated button, and it surprised me more than enough where it was taking me back to. So yes, Android could use a better/cleaner visual style, but that's not it's biggest problem. Also, if a new visual style would be adopted, it should be universal. Right now it's a mess of apps trying to do their own thing because the default style is ugly, and these examples demonstrate that perfectly... Android 4 has shown some improvement but I still don't like it. There are also quite a few iOS apps that don't necessarily respect the general look&feel of iOS, but some of them succeed in having a distinct style without clashing badly with the rest of the interface. Hell, Google showed that it is capable of doing just this, just look at the Google+ and the new YouTube app, they are pretty neat. I think Android UI designers should use iPhones and Windows 7/8 phones as their daily device, or switch at least once every week. Then they'd see what's wrong, what irritates them about every OS and find a way around some of the moronic decisions were made in some of these OS's, and all are guilty of this to some extend. Android at this moment however gets the crown in usability WTF's. Disclaimer: I own an iPhone and iPad, but mainly develop for Android/BB/WinMobile.
- notatoad 14y ago
  >And that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the Android UI, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing. I think this is more of a personal preference thing than something that is broken. I use an android phone, and used to use a honeycomb tablet. When i replaced the tablet with an iPad, the thing i hated most about iOS was the back button behaviour. In iOS back takes you back to wherever the application developer thinks back should take you. In Android, except for very rare cases, back takes you back to the previous screen you were on, which might be up one level like on iOS, or it might be a different app entirely. One isn't better than the other, they're just different functions.
- 14y ago
w1ntermute 14y ago
For anyone looking for a fully-featured notes app, Catch, mentioned in TFA, is the way to go. It does sync, has a web interface, and probably a 100 other features I haven't used.
- aschobel 14y ago
  Thank you for the kind comment! If anybody has any questions feel free to email me at a@catch.com
darkstalker 14y ago
It's already known that since ICS Android is prettier and more functional than iOS.
- mrich 14y ago
  This. I cannot help but think "old-fashioned" when seeing an iOS UI. It is smooth and functional, but it looks a bit from the seventies.
  - manmal 14y ago
    I have never seen a UI from the seventies, but I imagine them being more DOS-y. Yes, the design has not received any major upgrades for 5 years now, but this also makes users "feel at home". I once switched from my iPhone 1 to an HTC Desire because I wanted a fresh look - but boy did I wish my iPhone back after some weeks. I'm now both an iOS & Android dev and designer (and owning quite some devices from both sides), but I'll choose an iPhone anytime over iOS. There is no Android experience. There is only a Galaxy Nexus experience, an S3 experience,... But there IS an iPhone experience, and I know that my phone won't restart on me when I want to show my ticket to the train conductor.
lallouz 14y ago
Of course Android can be beautiful if you showcase a few screen shots created by some very talented designers. After spending the last 4 years as an Android developer, its clear that the platform falls short in two places at the intersection of UX and UI. I've worked with some of the best designers and they always produced beautiful assets and screens, but we were always left making important UX decisions that caused inconsistency with other apps. The "beauty" that many users come to appreciate with iOS and Metro, is the cross app consistency, experience and cohesion with the operating system itself. Even apps produced by Google have a tremendously wide gap in consistency. The other major problem is development decisions made (and allowed by the platform) by software engineers. More than a few of the apps in this list do unthinkable things like processing data on the UI thread or having terrible offline experiences. This can turn a beautifully designed app into a terrible app very quickly. It's important to distinguish "looks pretty" and "beautiful".
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Oh for the love of God, we still need convincing of this? Anyone with an ICS/JB phone knows that Android is perfectly capable of looking good. My "least-good" looking application that I use on a regular basis is the Flashlight app, and even then, it's just a big round glossy button.
ikhare 14y ago
Very happy to see the Bump 3.0 on there (I worked on it). ICS and all of it's native apps were a great statement by Google to show how they'd like their apps to look and feel. We followed their queue and used the action bar and view pager to great success. Also having a great visual designer doesn't hurt either.
marban 14y ago
...but only if you skip regular UI conventions
bstar77 14y ago
I agree that Android can look gorgeous, but that can only go so far. Android's problem is consistency. I've used every alternate android build I could find, and the custom (and default) themes and UI menu system lacked consistency. My favorite was MiUi and even that had terrible consistency issues. iOS, on the other hand, is supremely superior in this department. The cohesiveness of the experience is second to none. I value that over custom configurations any day. My android phones have been wonderful hack-fests, but at the end of the day, the one thing I can't hack into them is a consistent experience.
- chrisrhoden 14y ago
  Have you installed any apps on your iOS device? Consistency is pretty hard to come by these days.
  - bstar77 14y ago
    I find the iOS UI patterns to be consistent, but the "skins" on those UI elements tend to vary quite a bit. Now this is the case on the iPad, since I don't have an iPhone I cannot speak to that. Just getting a podcast program on android that had a consistent UI where things made sense was a fruitless effort. Streaming content is not consistent either, some apps stream really well (audio galaxy), while other stream terribly. These are the types of things that I found maddening.
    - chrisrhoden 14y ago
      The ActionBar is very consistent on these apps - of the first several dozen I only saw 2 that were not using an ActionBar. Streaming has nothing to do with UI consistency. It's a battle, because the APIs are very high level and you're limited in the amount of control you have without a ton of work, and it seems like manufacturers are screwing with the stack somewhere. Doesn't matter, though, because we're talking about UI consistency. The podcatcher app is sort of ripe for some good competition in this space, with Google Listen no longer available. I am working on something. http://imgur.com/RtG8e http://imgur.com/RtG8e , but someone else should get in here too.
miralize 14y ago
I just dont see. Beatuiful is extremely subjective, so the title of this is inherently incorrect. And beautiful they may be, but they are not usable, consistent, or friendly. And the ones that are close to being good, have niggling issues like spacing between items, which drives me nuts
angry-hacker 14y ago
I like the screenshots but I don't understand the navigation of the page and why would you hijack the default scrollbar of your browser? I'm surprised that so apps look WP metro style
- nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
  By "hijack the default scrollbar", you mean "apply standard webkit scrollbar CSS properties"?
  - recursive 14y ago
    The page is going off the right edge of my browser, and I can find no way to scroll see it. Call it what you want.
    - jentulman 14y ago
      There's a horizontal scrollbar per photoset just below the photo's. I'm guessing this was designed by someone with a multitouch trackpad. I know I tend to forget not everyone else has 2 finger scroll at their fingertips, I've had to get into a habit of having a test run using a mouse when I put together pages.
      - recursive 14y ago
        I see them now. I missed them because they don't look like scroll bars. I don't even know what 2 finger scroll is. I usually scroll with my mouse wheel. To scroll horizontally, I click the middle mouse button. These scroll bars seem not to support that.
        jentulman 14y ago
        I only found them after I went looking because of your comment. Seems weird not just to have the single horizontal scroll at the bottom, it's too fiddly. Those of us using multitouch trackpads can scroll by just swiping on the page using N fingers, like scrolling on a touch phone by dragging the page with your finger.
Dove 14y ago
Humbling. I though I was doing really well making Android apps, but these examples remind me how far there is to go.
spydum 14y ago
The great irony is that page runs terrible on my galaxy2 tablet..
cs702 14y ago
Android is no longer an ugly-duckling platform trying to catch up with iOS, but a beautiful platform that truly rivals iOS in all important ways -- and now surpasses it in terms of market share. However, mobile app developers have only recently begun to transition from "we need an app for Android too, quick!" to "we need great apps for both Android and iOS," so it will take a little while for all those ugly, hastily-put-together Android apps to become a thing of the past. UPDATE: koko775 raises a good point: the large installed base of pre-ICS Android versions may also be a factor. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533819 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533819
- Adirael 14y ago
  Is there a way to see how the fragmentation (most important for me: screen size) is at this moment? I've got a low end android phone (Galaxy Mini) which works well but I can't install a lot of stuff (Path comes to mind) because of screen resolution. I think the mobile OS market is going to end looking somewhat similar to the PC OS market, but changing Windows for Android. The market share race is impossible for Apple to win with their current pricing and model range. It's normal to see a lot of activations if the cheapest phone is $50
  - mtgx 14y ago
    I wish Google would force manufacturers to stop using the 320x240 resolution. The browsing experience is very poor on such a resolution, unless you're using Opera Mini perhaps, and I imagine it's hard for developers to refit their apps for such a small resolution, too, as even menu text will take a lot of space on that resolution. I also wish they mandated everyone has at least 512 MB of RAM in their phones, and at least 2 GB for the OS and 2 GB of app space. That way upgrades can be ensured for years, and people, especially regular people, can actually install more than 5 apps without running out of space (and no, App2SD doesn't count, and it's almost useless). And while they are at it, they should also stop supporting the ARMv6 architecture, now that the ARMv7 Cortex A5 and next year Cortex A7 are going to be used. If Google wants to bring down the hammer on manufacturers, it should be for stuff like this, that ensures users of Android devices, even at the very low-end, get a pretty good experience, otherwise they'll always think Android devices are crap, after their first cheap Android smartphone. They don't want that kind of perception to affect the Android brand in the long term.
tomp 14y ago
Reading this list, I just realized how useless all these apps feel. With the exception of Google Maps, when you really need it.
Osiris 14y ago
I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc. I would think that web designers, and designers in general, would be happy with the flexibility to create their own thing rather than having something that pretty much looks like everything else. The web used to have some consistencies, like <A> tags rendering as blue with an underline and always loaded a new page, but that's long since gone. Nowadays designers are free to make links look and work how they want. I, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. I prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same.
- richcollins 14y ago
  * I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc* And every day hundreds of millions of people waste some of their time and intelligence making sense of said inconsistent designs. This is why Safari's reader and Readability are so popular.
  - olalonde 14y ago
    And that's why no one complains about all those similar looking Bootstrap websites? /sarcasm
    - richcollins 14y ago
      Developers or users?
- recoiledsnake 14y ago
  >I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc. I see that as a bad thing and I get irritated every day especially on sites where I need information real fast, like the DMV, police, car insurance website, company careers page or address etc. Mystery meat navigation, especially on hover abounds on the web. Especially when I am on a phone, quickly getting the info I need for websites and apps is much more important than some slow loading website with 800KB of slow Javascript and retina sized images wrapped in byzantine navigation. http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation01.html http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation01.html
creativityhurts 14y ago
It can be beautiful on the large-screen top models like Nexus S, S2, S3 and so on that are owned by geeks, not on the LG Optimus-ish and other low-quality phones that regular people buy. On my Samsung Galaxy S Mini not so much, for example I couldn't install Path because the screen is too small.
- estel 14y ago
  I'm not sure it's safe to say that the S2 and S3 are mainly owned by geeks. Samsung have done a good job at targeting a similar demographic to the iPhone with those devices.
  - creativityhurts 14y ago
    They're among the most expensive Android devices and that's why I assumed they mostly owned by passionate users. My geek friends who are not on the Apple side of things have Nexus and S2/3 and the rest of the people I know who just wanted a not so expensive smartphone settled with Desire or Magic and so on.
northisup 14y ago
This is a list of apps that in no way use the android default widgets. So yes, it can be beautiful when you do all the hard work yourself. (and yes, these apps look fantastic)
- fpgeek 14y ago
  That's just not true. As others have noted, plenty of these apps are using the ActionBar (which is a default widget starting with 3.0, with an unofficial, open-source compatibility library) and plenty are using Fragments (also standard starting with 3.0, with an official compatibility library). Moreover, many of these apps (e.g. Boid, Pocket, Papermill) are explicitly Holo-themed, so, at a minimum, they're using the default widgets for design guidance even when they're not using them directly (for compatibility or other reasons).
shasty 14y ago
looks pretty ugly to me
ChrisArchitect 14y ago
another similar Android app design blog http://www.holoeverywhere.com/ http://www.holoeverywhere.com/
- natep 14y ago
  Was going to post this, since it goes into more detail about each app, and limits itself to apps that follow the Holo guidelines, rather than just 'beautiful' ones (for those that want a more 'consistent' experience). I'm now subscribed to both.
jamesjguthrie 14y ago
I really like the Google+ app, it's lovely.
enraged_camel 14y ago
It's good to see that Android is improving in this area. And I say that as an Apple "fanboi". That said, it is unfortunate that the ecosystem still suffers from heavy fragmentation, so only a small portion of users will be seeing the benefits mentioned in the article.
dbreunig 14y ago
It's comical/ironic how difficult that site is too browse.
- Yhippa 14y ago
  Scrolling down is too difficult?
  - qxcv 14y ago
    No, but scrolling across is difficult. And they hijack all the scrollbars so that they can show you a light grey box instead of the slightly lighter grey box which your browser normally shows. If they just displayed everything vertically and didn't mess with the scrollbars it would be an infinitely better site. Oh, and their theme locks up Firefox, however I'm willing to blame that on FF rather than the designer(s).
wahsd 14y ago
Slightly off topic, but anyone else notice that that site/page seems to somehow choke on something. It spun up my CPU over something, I think resizing the images or something. Don't have the time to look or care.
epo 14y ago
"Android can be beautiful" eh? Saying it doesn't make it so. As an aspiration it is so far from current reality as to be simply delusional.
corporalagumbo 14y ago
I'm surprised to see so many comments claiming these apps look like Metro. Frankly the level of design on WP is much lower - third-party apps are extremely low quality and all of MS's apps are much simpler and lack the richer textures and details of these apps. Judged on these screenshots, Android looks much nicer than WP, and seems to strike the right balance between clarity and detail.
barbs 14y ago
Android can also be really ugly http://fuglyandroid.tumblr.com/ http://fuglyandroid.tumblr.com/ :P
jemeshsu 14y ago
Are there other similar sites that showcase mobile app design? Best is one that covers Android, iOS and Metro apps.
brandoncapecci 14y ago
I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Android couldn't be beautiful but rather great design comes secondary to iOS. As far as innovative products go, I'd argue that this is still very much the case. Flipboard set a standard for beautiful news applications. Path reimagined what social could be on mobile and made numerous UI innovations. Instagram took a novel concept and made photosharing exciting to a new audience. Square showed off the increasing real business viability by making payments accessible to anyone with a phone. All these apps weren't available on Android for some time. Sure they are now but this far more a matter of increasing market share than a change of opinions and it continues to hold true as we see well-designed apps like Paper start iOS only. Android is by no means the epicenter of creativity on mobile and though beautiful, the ports largely still have substandard experiences than their iOS counterparts. In my opinion this is a result of equal parts hardware and audience. Android may be on more devices as a whole but many of the devices are not even remotely competitive with top-tier smartphones. They are sold with the intention of being budget friendly and thus it becomes a hassle to acquire the additional devices, adapt interfaces to the numerous screen sizes on them, and adjust for performance limitations. I also believe that the design of the iPhone naturally attracts great designers. Android has a reputation of throwing good hardware into poorly designed phones with cheap materials and inferior build quality - the future is just not as cool when you need to interact with plastic buttons. Lastly, I believe the iPhone audience is naturally more in tune to seek out great designed products. The openness that appeals to Android customers creates an expectation that applications should be free. There is a decreased interest in browsing the marketplace and many of the most popular apps are just free copycats of popular iPhone applications.
anuraj 14y ago
With ICS, android introduced a new design language and look and feel and usability have improved. But nevertheless, we have always found the default UI recommendations need to be overridden at least 10-20% of times to get a usable app. And yes, ICS still looks like a cross of iOS and Windows Phone 7.
BaconJuice 14y ago
Great site, thank you.
alpotryvayev 14y ago
It steadily becomes more user-friendly, but there will always be a lot of problems with different devices, and mostly with their screen size

384 points by mephju 14y ago

jtreminio 14y ago

Some more themes are on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/androidthemes/ http://www.reddit.com/r/androidthemes/

tvon 14y ago
These (in TFA) are app screenshots, not themes.

micheljansen 14y ago

Some of these are really nice. I'm curious how many of these are Android-specific though. Path looks pretty similar on iOS and so do FourSquare, Flipboard etc. Which of these are examples of good mobile design that holds itself on various platforms (iOS, Android etc.) and which are unique to Android?

mtgx 14y ago
Some of them definitely use the Holo UI style, while others use their own non-holo/non-iOS style, although I wouldn't know if they use the same one for their iOS apps, too.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Caballera 14y ago
Most of them look like their iOS counterparts. For example Catch Note's 'home' screen looks the same on Android as it does on iOS. Same with Flight Track Free and Feedly. Pintrest is more or less the same, with a slightly adjusted menu.
aschobel 14y ago
Co-founder of Catch here, some context; we launched our first Android app in 2008 and have about 10x as many users on there as we do on iOS. The issue we've seen is that people build an iOS app and then port it over to Android. We designed Catch 5.0 apps for Android and iPhone in parallel. This let us keep consistency between the platforms when it made sense, but also let us tweak the design early on so it could take advantage things unique to the platform, e.g. Action Bar on Android. The team is incredibly proud of this release, and it is nice to see folks taking notice. Both Google and Apple have also featured this release, everybody is beaming here. =)
waterlesscloud 14y ago
Path is gorgeous on Android, I like to just look at it. I just wish I had more than one friend actually using it. Heh.

rprasad 14y ago

This site contains a stack overflow bug which crashes Firefox and IE9 on Windows. Flagged.

icebraining 14y ago
Works fine on Firefox on Ubuntu.
mtgx 14y ago
Works fine in Chrome.
RandallBrown 14y ago
Works fine for me in IE9 and Firefox on Windows.
conradfr 14y ago
Yep my Firefox (on Win64) had a hard time loading it and became very slow, Chrome was fine.
rprasad 14y ago
UPDATE -- Revisited the site and it no longer crashes Firefox or IE9 on Windows. Unflagged. Now that I can see the examples, they are actually pretty decent.

seunghomattyang 14y ago

Reminds me of what Chief Creative Officer at doubleTwist said about designing for Android: >> As it stands, If you design a great app for Android and people say 'hey, that looks like an Android app', that means you've failed.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/sdw/status/187245772205600769 https://twitter.com/sdw/status/187245772205600769

rradu 14y ago
I don't think that's true. Some of these apps use elements from the Holo UI themes that are distinctly Android, and still look beautiful.
verganileonardo 14y ago
Before Android 4.0, yes. The new UI is beautiful.

zobzu 14y ago

is it bad if i find it inconsistent, annoying to use, etc? I mean, it is pretty (well, arguably, most of them are), but, the buttons are all over the place and everyone seems to have it's own UI plastered on top of more or less "android ui compliant" stuff.

angryasian 14y ago
the inconsistencies are usually defined by the developers. As you can see most these apps are available to the ios store as well. So its really not fair to judge the platform vs the developers.
mephju 14y ago
I think nobody would have a problem using any of these apps. Most of them even implement some kind of action bar so you totally know where to look for your user controls.
KirinDave 14y ago
This is a complaint about Mobile in general, not Android. People bitch about fragmentation (and it is a bit painful), but in the regard of "everyone has their own UX on top of the system default" iOS is in exactly as bad a boat, if not worse. Some of the most popular iOS apps take their UX off in crazy directions (a common example: Tweetbot). Look closely though. You'll notice the ActionBar is extremely prevalent in these. The ActionBar is actually one of those few Android teachable moments; I wish Apple did this as well, as consistently, or as themably. I've used a lot of these apps (and I am sad to not see Pattrn up there!) and it's very much the case that they have a fairly consistent set of "touch semantics" that screenshots don't reveal. E.g., Tap upper right corner to configure; long press for edit; swipe horizontally to navigate; long press on text fields to engage c/p editor bar. For better or worse, Android's toolkits offer a lot more guidance to the programmer on "the right way" than Apple's do (a great example of this that bleeds into UI is how Android has a ton of Loader patterns and iOS doesn't have anything nearly so sophisticated in its core lib). So in some respects, Android is actually slightly better off; the bigger toolkit means you get some superior consistency. The recent iterations (and backported support) framework strongly encourages you to do things like support long presses and swipe navigation and backpane navigation.

dpark 14y ago

These seem really inconsistent to me. Feedly looks almost like a metro (sorry, "Windows 8-style") app. doubleTwist looks like an iOS app, as do Square Card Reader and Tumblr. Reddit Sync Pro seems to fit in with Google+, so I assume that's what modern Android apps are supposed to look like. None of these general aesthetics are bad, but the inconsistency seems to be an issue. (Actually, a few of them do look bad to me, like Rdio, with the very dated "app home screen" that looks like it was copied from the old Facebook iOS app.)

pkulak 14y ago
Android doesn't have as much "drag and drop" as iOS. For example, you can't add a tab bar at the bottom, nav bar at the top, table view in the middle, set the text of each cell in the table view, and have an app that looks complete and looks like a stock Apple app. If you do that with Android you're just going to have a flat black screen with lines of text crammed next to each other with 0px of spacing. You really have to do _all_ your own design with Android. That tends to lead to more inconsistency, but more originality as well. Besides, when each app takes up all available real estate, do you really need consistency between apps? Distinctive styles are just a nice reminder of what app you're in.
- niho 14y ago
  It's not (only) about the consistency of visual style. It's about the the consistency of interaction.
  - KirinDave 14y ago
    But this is not a problem Android has when apps target 4.0. The ActionBar has been a huge stabilizing influence on the Android interaction pattern; strongly enforcing backpaning, swipe-to-navigate, and consistent locations for navigation. I'm not sure why you'd say this. Android actually hasn't suffered from tactile UI fragmentation much more than iOS has.
    - dpark 14y ago

recoiledsnake 14y ago

Looks somewhat inspired by Metro... not that that's a bad thing. ICS made a huge stride in the Android UI, and Google was even talking up the new font during the announcement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f92ptAjm3I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f92ptAjm3I http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f17ujh98k-U http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f...

untog 14y ago

Since ICS, Android is beautiful. Well, the OS core is, anyway. Widget makers and the like still don't seem to have got the design memo, but I suspect that's because design talents are so focused on iOS. We just need the app makers to catch up. Foursquare, for instance, has been redesigned and looks great. However, their widgets haven't been touched and look awful by comparison. Spotify has done a far better job of updating everything at once.

koko775 14y ago
It's not because design talents are focused on iOS, it's that design talents are focused on the Android users that are worth targeting. Namely, people on 2.1 or 2.2+. Android generally monetizes/converts worse than iOS, so those who want a presence on Android can't afford to take advantage of any of the new stuff until old devices are retired sufficiently to make the tradeoff really worth it. It's been really tough to see all of the improvements, because Google is addressing user upgrades so poorly (even though the fault lies mostly with the manufacturers) that the upgrade problem is such a big deal for developers.
- untog 14y ago
  Not true, actually. Google has released a compatibility library to allow developers to target old versions: http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.html http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.ht... So older Android versions can use modern apps. Both the examples I gave (Foursquare, Spotify) work with both newer and older versions.
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    There are some pretty gaping holes in the compatibility library. Luckily the most important of these (ActionBar support) is covered by a great 3rd party library (ActionBarSherlock). If anything, I think the existence of the compatibility library and ABS show that Google is dropping the ball a bit on the core Android framework. Why even have these be extra (and in one case 3rd party) libraries? Where possible why not just write the core SDK in a way such that it can fall back to 1.6 or 2.2 without having to worry about fiddling with compatibility libraries?

tvon 14y ago

There are some very nice looking apps in there. Kind of meta but IMO the screenshots on that site are too big and should be scaled down a bit.

bmunro 14y ago
There is a size selector on the left. S M L XL The XL is the actual size (pixel-wise) that you would see on a phone such as the Galaxy Nexus.

squarecat 14y ago

Beautiful != usable

dictum 14y ago
Two attributes that are not mutually exclusive.

se85 14y ago

Beautiful != Consistency

koffiezet 14y ago

The problem with the Android UI isn't (only) the lack of beauty, it's the lack of consistency, style and attention to detail. Things like included/used fonts (although the default iOS notes app also fails horribly here), placement of back buttons. And that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the Android UI, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing. In iOS the 'back' button is always on the same location AND tells you where you're going back to. Android has a dedicated button, and it surprised me more than enough where it was taking me back to. So yes, Android could use a better/cleaner visual style, but that's not it's biggest problem. Also, if a new visual style would be adopted, it should be universal. Right now it's a mess of apps trying to do their own thing because the default style is ugly, and these examples demonstrate that perfectly... Android 4 has shown some improvement but I still don't like it. There are also quite a few iOS apps that don't necessarily respect the general look&feel of iOS, but some of them succeed in having a distinct style without clashing badly with the rest of the interface. Hell, Google showed that it is capable of doing just this, just look at the Google+ and the new YouTube app, they are pretty neat. I think Android UI designers should use iPhones and Windows 7/8 phones as their daily device, or switch at least once every week. Then they'd see what's wrong, what irritates them about every OS and find a way around some of the moronic decisions were made in some of these OS's, and all are guilty of this to some extend. Android at this moment however gets the crown in usability WTF's. Disclaimer: I own an iPhone and iPad, but mainly develop for Android/BB/WinMobile.

notatoad 14y ago
>And that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the Android UI, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing. I think this is more of a personal preference thing than something that is broken. I use an android phone, and used to use a honeycomb tablet. When i replaced the tablet with an iPad, the thing i hated most about iOS was the back button behaviour. In iOS back takes you back to wherever the application developer thinks back should take you. In Android, except for very rare cases, back takes you back to the previous screen you were on, which might be up one level like on iOS, or it might be a different app entirely. One isn't better than the other, they're just different functions.
14y ago

w1ntermute 14y ago

For anyone looking for a fully-featured notes app, Catch, mentioned in TFA, is the way to go. It does sync, has a web interface, and probably a 100 other features I haven't used.

aschobel 14y ago
Thank you for the kind comment! If anybody has any questions feel free to email me at a@catch.com

darkstalker 14y ago

It's already known that since ICS Android is prettier and more functional than iOS.

mrich 14y ago
This. I cannot help but think "old-fashioned" when seeing an iOS UI. It is smooth and functional, but it looks a bit from the seventies.
- manmal 14y ago
  I have never seen a UI from the seventies, but I imagine them being more DOS-y. Yes, the design has not received any major upgrades for 5 years now, but this also makes users "feel at home". I once switched from my iPhone 1 to an HTC Desire because I wanted a fresh look - but boy did I wish my iPhone back after some weeks. I'm now both an iOS & Android dev and designer (and owning quite some devices from both sides), but I'll choose an iPhone anytime over iOS. There is no Android experience. There is only a Galaxy Nexus experience, an S3 experience,... But there IS an iPhone experience, and I know that my phone won't restart on me when I want to show my ticket to the train conductor.

lallouz 14y ago

Of course Android can be beautiful if you showcase a few screen shots created by some very talented designers. After spending the last 4 years as an Android developer, its clear that the platform falls short in two places at the intersection of UX and UI. I've worked with some of the best designers and they always produced beautiful assets and screens, but we were always left making important UX decisions that caused inconsistency with other apps. The "beauty" that many users come to appreciate with iOS and Metro, is the cross app consistency, experience and cohesion with the operating system itself. Even apps produced by Google have a tremendously wide gap in consistency. The other major problem is development decisions made (and allowed by the platform) by software engineers. More than a few of the apps in this list do unthinkable things like processing data on the UI thread or having terrible offline experiences. This can turn a beautifully designed app into a terrible app very quickly. It's important to distinguish "looks pretty" and "beautiful".

drivebyacct2 14y ago

Oh for the love of God, we still need convincing of this? Anyone with an ICS/JB phone knows that Android is perfectly capable of looking good. My "least-good" looking application that I use on a regular basis is the Flashlight app, and even then, it's just a big round glossy button.

ikhare 14y ago

Very happy to see the Bump 3.0 on there (I worked on it). ICS and all of it's native apps were a great statement by Google to show how they'd like their apps to look and feel. We followed their queue and used the action bar and view pager to great success. Also having a great visual designer doesn't hurt either.

marban 14y ago

...but only if you skip regular UI conventions

bstar77 14y ago

I agree that Android can look gorgeous, but that can only go so far. Android's problem is consistency. I've used every alternate android build I could find, and the custom (and default) themes and UI menu system lacked consistency. My favorite was MiUi and even that had terrible consistency issues. iOS, on the other hand, is supremely superior in this department. The cohesiveness of the experience is second to none. I value that over custom configurations any day. My android phones have been wonderful hack-fests, but at the end of the day, the one thing I can't hack into them is a consistent experience.

chrisrhoden 14y ago
Have you installed any apps on your iOS device? Consistency is pretty hard to come by these days.
- bstar77 14y ago
  I find the iOS UI patterns to be consistent, but the "skins" on those UI elements tend to vary quite a bit. Now this is the case on the iPad, since I don't have an iPhone I cannot speak to that. Just getting a podcast program on android that had a consistent UI where things made sense was a fruitless effort. Streaming content is not consistent either, some apps stream really well (audio galaxy), while other stream terribly. These are the types of things that I found maddening.
  - chrisrhoden 14y ago
    The ActionBar is very consistent on these apps - of the first several dozen I only saw 2 that were not using an ActionBar. Streaming has nothing to do with UI consistency. It's a battle, because the APIs are very high level and you're limited in the amount of control you have without a ton of work, and it seems like manufacturers are screwing with the stack somewhere. Doesn't matter, though, because we're talking about UI consistency. The podcatcher app is sort of ripe for some good competition in this space, with Google Listen no longer available. I am working on something. http://imgur.com/RtG8e http://imgur.com/RtG8e , but someone else should get in here too.

miralize 14y ago

I just dont see. Beatuiful is extremely subjective, so the title of this is inherently incorrect. And beautiful they may be, but they are not usable, consistent, or friendly. And the ones that are close to being good, have niggling issues like spacing between items, which drives me nuts

angry-hacker 14y ago

I like the screenshots but I don't understand the navigation of the page and why would you hijack the default scrollbar of your browser? I'm surprised that so apps look WP metro style

nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
By "hijack the default scrollbar", you mean "apply standard webkit scrollbar CSS properties"?
- recursive 14y ago
  The page is going off the right edge of my browser, and I can find no way to scroll see it. Call it what you want.
  - jentulman 14y ago
    There's a horizontal scrollbar per photoset just below the photo's. I'm guessing this was designed by someone with a multitouch trackpad. I know I tend to forget not everyone else has 2 finger scroll at their fingertips, I've had to get into a habit of having a test run using a mouse when I put together pages.
    - recursive 14y ago
      I see them now. I missed them because they don't look like scroll bars. I don't even know what 2 finger scroll is. I usually scroll with my mouse wheel. To scroll horizontally, I click the middle mouse button. These scroll bars seem not to support that.
      - jentulman 14y ago
        I only found them after I went looking because of your comment. Seems weird not just to have the single horizontal scroll at the bottom, it's too fiddly. Those of us using multitouch trackpads can scroll by just swiping on the page using N fingers, like scrolling on a touch phone by dragging the page with your finger.

Dove 14y ago

Humbling. I though I was doing really well making Android apps, but these examples remind me how far there is to go.

spydum 14y ago

The great irony is that page runs terrible on my galaxy2 tablet..

cs702 14y ago

Android is no longer an ugly-duckling platform trying to catch up with iOS, but a beautiful platform that truly rivals iOS in all important ways -- and now surpasses it in terms of market share. However, mobile app developers have only recently begun to transition from "we need an app for Android too, quick!" to "we need great apps for both Android and iOS," so it will take a little while for all those ugly, hastily-put-together Android apps to become a thing of the past. UPDATE: koko775 raises a good point: the large installed base of pre-ICS Android versions may also be a factor. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533819 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533819

Adirael 14y ago
Is there a way to see how the fragmentation (most important for me: screen size) is at this moment? I've got a low end android phone (Galaxy Mini) which works well but I can't install a lot of stuff (Path comes to mind) because of screen resolution. I think the mobile OS market is going to end looking somewhat similar to the PC OS market, but changing Windows for Android. The market share race is impossible for Apple to win with their current pricing and model range. It's normal to see a lot of activations if the cheapest phone is $50
- mtgx 14y ago
  I wish Google would force manufacturers to stop using the 320x240 resolution. The browsing experience is very poor on such a resolution, unless you're using Opera Mini perhaps, and I imagine it's hard for developers to refit their apps for such a small resolution, too, as even menu text will take a lot of space on that resolution. I also wish they mandated everyone has at least 512 MB of RAM in their phones, and at least 2 GB for the OS and 2 GB of app space. That way upgrades can be ensured for years, and people, especially regular people, can actually install more than 5 apps without running out of space (and no, App2SD doesn't count, and it's almost useless). And while they are at it, they should also stop supporting the ARMv6 architecture, now that the ARMv7 Cortex A5 and next year Cortex A7 are going to be used. If Google wants to bring down the hammer on manufacturers, it should be for stuff like this, that ensures users of Android devices, even at the very low-end, get a pretty good experience, otherwise they'll always think Android devices are crap, after their first cheap Android smartphone. They don't want that kind of perception to affect the Android brand in the long term.

tomp 14y ago

Reading this list, I just realized how useless all these apps feel. With the exception of Google Maps, when you really need it.

Osiris 14y ago

I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc. I would think that web designers, and designers in general, would be happy with the flexibility to create their own thing rather than having something that pretty much looks like everything else. The web used to have some consistencies, like <A> tags rendering as blue with an underline and always loaded a new page, but that's long since gone. Nowadays designers are free to make links look and work how they want. I, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. I prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same.

richcollins 14y ago
* I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc* And every day hundreds of millions of people waste some of their time and intelligence making sense of said inconsistent designs. This is why Safari's reader and Readability are so popular.
- olalonde 14y ago
  And that's why no one complains about all those similar looking Bootstrap websites? /sarcasm
  - richcollins 14y ago
    Developers or users?
recoiledsnake 14y ago
>I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc. I see that as a bad thing and I get irritated every day especially on sites where I need information real fast, like the DMV, police, car insurance website, company careers page or address etc. Mystery meat navigation, especially on hover abounds on the web. Especially when I am on a phone, quickly getting the info I need for websites and apps is much more important than some slow loading website with 800KB of slow Javascript and retina sized images wrapped in byzantine navigation. http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation01.html http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation01.html

creativityhurts 14y ago

It can be beautiful on the large-screen top models like Nexus S, S2, S3 and so on that are owned by geeks, not on the LG Optimus-ish and other low-quality phones that regular people buy. On my Samsung Galaxy S Mini not so much, for example I couldn't install Path because the screen is too small.

estel 14y ago
I'm not sure it's safe to say that the S2 and S3 are mainly owned by geeks. Samsung have done a good job at targeting a similar demographic to the iPhone with those devices.
- creativityhurts 14y ago
  They're among the most expensive Android devices and that's why I assumed they mostly owned by passionate users. My geek friends who are not on the Apple side of things have Nexus and S2/3 and the rest of the people I know who just wanted a not so expensive smartphone settled with Desire or Magic and so on.

northisup 14y ago

This is a list of apps that in no way use the android default widgets. So yes, it can be beautiful when you do all the hard work yourself. (and yes, these apps look fantastic)

fpgeek 14y ago
That's just not true. As others have noted, plenty of these apps are using the ActionBar (which is a default widget starting with 3.0, with an unofficial, open-source compatibility library) and plenty are using Fragments (also standard starting with 3.0, with an official compatibility library). Moreover, many of these apps (e.g. Boid, Pocket, Papermill) are explicitly Holo-themed, so, at a minimum, they're using the default widgets for design guidance even when they're not using them directly (for compatibility or other reasons).

shasty 14y ago

looks pretty ugly to me

ChrisArchitect 14y ago

another similar Android app design blog http://www.holoeverywhere.com/ http://www.holoeverywhere.com/

natep 14y ago
Was going to post this, since it goes into more detail about each app, and limits itself to apps that follow the Holo guidelines, rather than just 'beautiful' ones (for those that want a more 'consistent' experience). I'm now subscribed to both.

jamesjguthrie 14y ago

I really like the Google+ app, it's lovely.

enraged_camel 14y ago

It's good to see that Android is improving in this area. And I say that as an Apple "fanboi". That said, it is unfortunate that the ecosystem still suffers from heavy fragmentation, so only a small portion of users will be seeing the benefits mentioned in the article.

dbreunig 14y ago

It's comical/ironic how difficult that site is too browse.

Yhippa 14y ago
Scrolling down is too difficult?
- qxcv 14y ago
  No, but scrolling across is difficult. And they hijack all the scrollbars so that they can show you a light grey box instead of the slightly lighter grey box which your browser normally shows. If they just displayed everything vertically and didn't mess with the scrollbars it would be an infinitely better site. Oh, and their theme locks up Firefox, however I'm willing to blame that on FF rather than the designer(s).

wahsd 14y ago

Slightly off topic, but anyone else notice that that site/page seems to somehow choke on something. It spun up my CPU over something, I think resizing the images or something. Don't have the time to look or care.

epo 14y ago

"Android can be beautiful" eh? Saying it doesn't make it so. As an aspiration it is so far from current reality as to be simply delusional.

corporalagumbo 14y ago

I'm surprised to see so many comments claiming these apps look like Metro. Frankly the level of design on WP is much lower - third-party apps are extremely low quality and all of MS's apps are much simpler and lack the richer textures and details of these apps. Judged on these screenshots, Android looks much nicer than WP, and seems to strike the right balance between clarity and detail.

barbs 14y ago

Android can also be really ugly http://fuglyandroid.tumblr.com/ http://fuglyandroid.tumblr.com/ :P

jemeshsu 14y ago

Are there other similar sites that showcase mobile app design? Best is one that covers Android, iOS and Metro apps.

brandoncapecci 14y ago

I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Android couldn't be beautiful but rather great design comes secondary to iOS. As far as innovative products go, I'd argue that this is still very much the case. Flipboard set a standard for beautiful news applications. Path reimagined what social could be on mobile and made numerous UI innovations. Instagram took a novel concept and made photosharing exciting to a new audience. Square showed off the increasing real business viability by making payments accessible to anyone with a phone. All these apps weren't available on Android for some time. Sure they are now but this far more a matter of increasing market share than a change of opinions and it continues to hold true as we see well-designed apps like Paper start iOS only. Android is by no means the epicenter of creativity on mobile and though beautiful, the ports largely still have substandard experiences than their iOS counterparts. In my opinion this is a result of equal parts hardware and audience. Android may be on more devices as a whole but many of the devices are not even remotely competitive with top-tier smartphones. They are sold with the intention of being budget friendly and thus it becomes a hassle to acquire the additional devices, adapt interfaces to the numerous screen sizes on them, and adjust for performance limitations. I also believe that the design of the iPhone naturally attracts great designers. Android has a reputation of throwing good hardware into poorly designed phones with cheap materials and inferior build quality - the future is just not as cool when you need to interact with plastic buttons. Lastly, I believe the iPhone audience is naturally more in tune to seek out great designed products. The openness that appeals to Android customers creates an expectation that applications should be free. There is a decreased interest in browsing the marketplace and many of the most popular apps are just free copycats of popular iPhone applications.

anuraj 14y ago

With ICS, android introduced a new design language and look and feel and usability have improved. But nevertheless, we have always found the default UI recommendations need to be overridden at least 10-20% of times to get a usable app. And yes, ICS still looks like a cross of iOS and Windows Phone 7.

BaconJuice 14y ago

Great site, thank you.

alpotryvayev 14y ago

It steadily becomes more user-friendly, but there will always be a lot of problems with different devices, and mostly with their screen size