Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 89 posts

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#41

Post by jgruber »

ryandrake wrote: post #39
robotshmobot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to quantify feel? Gruber's saying the vibes are off, that the attention to detail in the interaction design isn't there.

I think if he's going to praise some apps and dunk on the other ones, he should compare using measurable criteria. Otherwise, it's only one person's opinion. Just saying "App X feels right" is like saying "App X has a better chakra energy." What is any developer supposed to do with that feedback? The whole article could have boiled down to "I personally like these apps and I don't like those."

That’s like asking for “measurable criteria” for evaluating a movie or novel or song or painting. It’s art. I will offer another quote from Kubrick: “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.”

If you don’t think apps can be artistic works, it’s no wonder you don’t understand what I’m trying to express.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#42

Post by jgruber »

hellisothers wrote: post #20
anaisbetts wrote: post #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-adj…

An iPhone from 2019 (which my wife has) still scrolls very smoothly. I assume he isn’t talking about refresh rate, he is talking About jerkily scrolling because the developer is making blocking calls on the main thread or re-rendering already visible elements. I also experience this on my Android test device.

Correct. I am not talking about frame rate.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#43

Post by ryandrake »

jgruber wrote: post #41
ryandrake wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if he's going to praise some apps and dunk on the other ones, he should compare using measurable criteria. Otherwise, it's only one person's opinion. Just saying "App X feels right" is like saying "App X has a better chakra energy." What is any developer supposed to do with that feedback? The whole article could have boiled down to "I personally like these apps and I don't like those."

That’s like asking for “measurable criteria” for evaluating a movie or novel or song or painting. It’s art. I will offer another quote from Kubrick: “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” If you don’t think apps can be artistic works, it’s no wonder you don’t understand what I’m trying to express.

I suppose our fundamental difference is over whether these apps are best compared as tools or as works of art. When I evaluate and compare tools, in addition to cost, I'm looking at things like speed to perform key tasks, ease/speed to navigate the UI, reliability, error rate, user mistake-rate, latency, accuracy, feature discoverability. Does it effectively do what it says on the tin? And are these attributes greater than or less than those of competing tools? These are all things the developer can take as feedback, file as bugs, go back and improve, and re-measure.

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.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#44

Post by robenkleene »

ryandrake wrote: post #43
jgruber wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s like asking for “measurable criteria” for evaluating a movie or novel or song or painting. It’s art. I will offer another quote from Kubrick: “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” If you don’t think apps can be artistic works, it’s no wonder you don’t understand what I’m trying to express.

I suppose our fundamental difference is over whether these apps are best compared as tools or as works of art. When I evaluate and compare tools, in addition to cost, I'm looking at things like speed to perform key tasks, ease/speed to navigate the UI, reliability, error rate, user mistake-rate, latency, accuracy, feature discoverability. Does it effectively do what it says on the tin? And are these attributes greate…

> 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.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#45

Post by Gorbzel »

politelemon wrote: post #11

This is a strange read. Making assumptions about an entire platform from a few cherry picked examples. That's a very low quality post. Having worked in both platforms I can say their conclusions are demonstrably false, if not outright biased.

I’ve worked on both platforms for over a decade. Gruber’s conclusions are spot on.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#46

Post by mediamogul »

ryandrake wrote: post #43
jgruber wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s like asking for “measurable criteria” for evaluating a movie or novel or song or painting. It’s art. I will offer another quote from Kubrick: “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” If you don’t think apps can be artistic works, it’s no wonder you don’t understand what I’m trying to express.

I suppose our fundamental difference is over whether these apps are best compared as tools or as works of art. When I evaluate and compare tools, in addition to cost, I'm looking at things like speed to perform key tasks, ease/speed to navigate the UI, reliability, error rate, user mistake-rate, latency, accuracy, feature discoverability. Does it effectively do what it says on the tin? And are these attributes greate…

If you owned a restaurant and got a Yelp review like “the food was great but the ambiance was a turn-off” what would you do?

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#47

Post by benced »

anaisbetts wrote: post #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-adj…

I have a 2019 iPhone (11 Pro!) and the scrolling is perfect. Battery about to die though.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#48

Post by kitsunesoba »

adamredwoods wrote: post #32
politelemon wrote: post #11

This is a strange read. Making assumptions about an entire platform from a few cherry picked examples. That's a very low quality post. Having worked in both platforms I can say their conclusions are demonstrably false, if not outright biased.

He has a lot of strange, biased writings, because he's an Apple evangelist. >> 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 o…

If well applied, things like animation in UI isn't superfluous. I would agree that a lot of animation in software is superfluous, but that doesn't mean that it has to be.

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.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#49

Post by kitsunesoba »

WoodenChair wrote: post #22

The missing piece here is the platform APIs. It’s less effort in UIKit to do swipe gestures and contextual menus than it is in the traditional Android APIs, so more developers do it. This equation may change with Jetpack Compose vs SwiftUI but I don’t have enough experience with Compose to say.

As someone who develops for both platforms I agree. Android Framework is just not as good as UIKit and may never be. Jetpack Compose does seem to be an improvement based on the dabbling I've done, but it's still a work in progress and there's no telling how long Google's interest in the project will persist.

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.

Re: Meanwhile, over in Androidtown

#50

Post by MBCook »

akmarinov wrote: post #27
politelemon wrote: post #11

This is a strange read. Making assumptions about an entire platform from a few cherry picked examples. That's a very low quality post. Having worked in both platforms I can say their conclusions are demonstrably false, if not outright biased.

Obvioulsy Gruber is extremely pro-Apple He's also been showing his age quite a bit, being against a lot of recent developments, like being anti-remote work.

> like being anti-remote work.

I don’t remember that at all. Can you provide a link?

Post reply on HN