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

Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 144 posts

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#11

Post by drawkbox »

They design for the devices they have. They also design for the largest part of the viewing traffic of the web (ios). Apple is still a design deity.

Apple had the first big app platform and clients still demand iOS first. In game and app development, it still gets the most focus.

Finally, and a bit of a trick almost, is the review times are longer for Apple when talking about apps, this causes a focus on iOS earlier many times. Projects tend towards getting iOS ready early and in the queue and approved and the Android platforms second because Google Play is instant almost (Amazon is as slow as Apple on reviews). Like complaining customers that get the most focus, the more difficult to approve platform gets the most focus but only because of its market share and past (new entrants need to be easier).

However with Google's beta system on Play more and more projects are starting there now that a good chunk of clients have Android devices. Apple really needed to buy testflight because they didn't have anything as nice. Android is becoming a better test market and something you can iterate on faster early to prepare it for iOS, lots of game developers are thinking this way now, primarily because iOS is so hit driven at launch you have to get right and Google is better long tail is seems.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#12

Post by sigsergv »

tomasien wrote: post #5
wallflower wrote: post #3

From personal experience and from hearing 1st person stories of startups who went Android second, it takes at least 2x to even 3x the amount of time to build an Android app. This is why when a very talented Android engineer like Sarah Haider (Twitter's Android lead) goes from Twitter to Secret, it is a big deal. There are many strong, capable iOS technical leads out there and probably a fraction thereof in Droidlandi…

Eclipse is also HORRIBLE. Horrible, horrible horrible. Objective-C isn't exactly easy to understand, but Xcode is. I could functionally make things work in Xcode in 2 days having no experience with C or Objective C, I've probably spent 6 weeks in Eclipse in my life and I still couldn't really tell you how to do things. I have to re-learn it every time I want to do something, especially with the UI.

I can say the same for XCode — it's insanely horrible and completely unusable.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#13

Post by tomasien »

jaydz wrote: post #8
tomasien wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eclipse is also HORRIBLE. Horrible, horrible horrible. Objective-C isn't exactly easy to understand, but Xcode is. I could functionally make things work in Xcode in 2 days having no experience with C or Objective C, I've probably spent 6 weeks in Eclipse in my life and I still couldn't really tell you how to do things. I have to re-learn it every time I want to do something, especially with the UI.

Give Android Studio a shot. Makes laying out the UI in XML a breeze with its excellent intellisense.

I've heard that, and that's fine - I appreciate the suggestion and will probably use it, but if that's actually the best then people will take Android dev more seriously when the best is the standard IDE. Right now Eclipse is the default and it blows.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#14

Post by joezydeco »

mmuro wrote: post #10

Fragmentation is a real thing, not laziness. Almost 98% of Android users don't run KitKat.

And then you read about stuff like this[1]:

"Mika says it spent 20% of its total development time last year on the process of porting two of its games to Android and then tweaking those titles for individual devices. It could never even get Battleheart to work on Galaxy S phones, because they can't download .apk's larger than 30MB with stock software. For all the months of "thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through," Mika claims it never made a profit off either of its Android games."

Geez, I wouldn't go into Android game development after reading this. And we haven't even breached the piracy issues.

[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/03/12/mika-mobiles-decisio...

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#15

Post by tomasien »

sigsergv wrote: post #12
tomasien wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eclipse is also HORRIBLE. Horrible, horrible horrible. Objective-C isn't exactly easy to understand, but Xcode is. I could functionally make things work in Xcode in 2 days having no experience with C or Objective C, I've probably spent 6 weeks in Eclipse in my life and I still couldn't really tell you how to do things. I have to re-learn it every time I want to do something, especially with the UI.

I can say the same for XCode — it's insanely horrible and completely unusable.

I suppose to each their own, but if anything except for the provisioning/plist stuff in Xcode is complicated to you, you must be used to something else because in and of itself xCode is phenomenal.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#16

Post by taspeotis »

Granted I'm a developer who's just starting out with Android, but for the life of me I can't figure out any reasonable way to position things with percentages and maximum widths. I tried weight_sum and weight and gravity=center and that gets me percentages but then maxWidth is ignored.

Most of the advice online seems to be "you must construct additional LinearLayouts".

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#17

Post by georgemcbay »

mmuro wrote: post #10

Fragmentation is a real thing, not laziness. Almost 98% of Android users don't run KitKat.

It is both a real thing and laziness. With decent technical design and Google's Android support library you can pretty much code as if 98% of people run KitKat and not worry about it, the support library will fallback gracefully down to all the OS versions you do care about.

Most of the time when I hear designers complaining about Android fragmentation they are really just using "fragmentation" as a scapegoat to bemoan they fact that they can't just create a very small set (1-3) of universal "pixel perfect" mockups and ship those off as a PSD to a developer as the end-all, be-all "visual spec". They have to worry about things like how different parts of the app should scale as more real estate is made available, really understand DPI (I've met more than a few designers who shockingly don't really grasp DPI scaling), etc. Some designers are awesome at this and welcome the challenges (and benefits!) that "responsive layout" brings with it, but a lot of them (most of them, in my personal experience) just want to punt on all that shit.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#18

Post by mortenjorck »

Zigurd wrote: post #7
wallflower wrote: post #3

From personal experience and from hearing 1st person stories of startups who went Android second, it takes at least 2x to even 3x the amount of time to build an Android app. This is why when a very talented Android engineer like Sarah Haider (Twitter's Android lead) goes from Twitter to Secret, it is a big deal. There are many strong, capable iOS technical leads out there and probably a fraction thereof in Droidlandi…

> To make an app on Android look good, the responsibility lies much more on the developer than the designer. I would add that the designer has to understand Fragment, understand that density, orientation, screen size and text size are different dimensions of screen geometry, and how to avoid a combinatorial explosion of layouts, or, conversely, layouts that only work at default font sizes on medium denisty screens. T…

Absolutely. In a lot of ways, Android UI design is like designing for the web, in that you're designing rules for layout more than you're designing specific layouts.

Although I'd argue that that's really what designers should be doing anyway, thinking procedurally and in terms of systems rather than fixed, one-off designs.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#20

Post by batiudrami »

mmuro wrote: post #10

Fragmentation is a real thing, not laziness. Almost 98% of Android users don't run KitKat.

Does that really matter though? Apps which require 4.0+ still frequently have terrible design which is just an iOS clone, complete with fuzzy assets and a frustratingly iOS-centric UI.

At the same time, developers like ShiftyJelly (www.shiftyjelly.com) show that fantastic crossplatform apps can be developed which have a great Android UI and are still very similar to their iOS counterparts.

I genuinely think it is just laziness, but while users continue to put up with it (especially since Android users appear to be happy to stick with a shitty UI on a free app compared to dropping a couple of dollars on a great one), it is unlikely to change.

Post reply on HN