Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
daringfireball.net
Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
1–10 of 89 posts
Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
#2Look, it's a blast from 2012, when iOS partisans were fond of claiming that the fatal flaw with Android was lower number of niche, low-audience apps or low app quality or something.
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.
Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
#3Meanwhile, over in iOS land, you cannot call route calls through another service, filter notifications, or run emulators. There is missing functionality, which can never be fixed, not just missing UI niceties in particular apps with (let's be honest) relatively low usage, which get fixed over time as usage increases.
Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
#4Posted yesterday:
Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
#5Android's Mastodon choices are indeed rather... surprisingly underwhelming. For many reasons, not just lack of flair. It feels odd to me too.
>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.
Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
#6I'm on Android and use Mastodon in the browser. I wonder whether this is disproportionately common on Android relative to iOS, and so there's less interest in Android native clients?
Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
#7Meanwhile, over in iOS land, you cannot call route calls through another service, filter notifications, or run emulators. There is missing functionality, which can never be fixed, not just missing UI niceties in particular apps with (let's be honest) relatively low usage, which get fixed over time as usage increases.
Those are great examples of why iOS will never take over the entire phone market regardless of how much better a user-experience they have. Low price is another prominent "feature" that you can't get in an iPhone.
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?
Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
#8If it were about something older than Mastodon, this post feels like it could've been written in 2011.
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?
Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
#9does ios allow web browsers to have ad blocking extensions? because that's literally the only thing that will ever matter to me about the difference between the platforms
Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown
#10> ...on my home screen on my Pixel 4...
> 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