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

31–40 of 144 posts

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#31

Post by logn »

>A browser permanently playing catch-up will always be an additional, potentially redundant, layer in the technology stack. If a single OS ends up running >90% of the world’s connected devices, why bother writing software for the browser?

I can't agree here. I think the OS world will be fragmented for a very long time (forever) and that the browser world will always have a core set of functionality to write apps once that run everywhere. I don't think Android, iOS, or the desktop browser are going anywhere fast, and so the only platform you can write for that reaches all three is the browser.

I suppose the author is predicting the end of desktops/laptops being relevant but even given that (which I don't think will ever happen) there will still be iOS and Android. That's still double the work to release one app on both. People will always try to find the common denominator and the browser is it (even if in another incarnation, e.g., Cordova/PhoneGap).

And assuming Android beats iOS, I can't imagine it beats the WWW too. I'd like to see a statistical breakdown of "native" apps with embedded browsers vs actual native apps. And if Cordova simply won't ever offer an elegant enough user experience, then I think Firefox OS will become the winner. The WWW is just so much bigger than Objective C or Dalvik, no one's going to port all that. So, even assuming that one OS rules >90% of devices, what percent of existing webapps/websites is that? And what percent of existing mobile apps' tech stacks is that, accounting for apps that are seemingly native but actually built on web tech?

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#32

Post by [deleted] »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #25
badman_ting wrote: post #22

Elephant in the room = adoption rate of current OS version. "Kit Kat is awesome!!" That's great. Who is using it?

I am. On my Nexus 5. Compared to a iPhone 5s, this runs circles around it. I'm not trying to start a flamewar or anything, but why are iOS devices so slow and clunky, and why is the UI so... fruity? Its just weird.

[deleted]

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#34

Post by sedev »

> The other replies were mostly variations on the theme that Android users don’t pay for apps, they don’t have data plans, you can’t monetise them easily, and designers are all iPhone users and don’t really understand Android users … Socially, excluding Android users seems almost prejudicial. Unlike Android is difficult, this isn’t about about mere convenience; it’s a value judgment on who is worth designing for. Put uncharitably, the root issue is “Android users are poor”.

This position sells the opposing argument short. It's not so much "designers believe a priori that Android users won't pay for good design," it's "Android users have a long and well-established track record of not paying for good design." People are still experimenting, and I think that this is actually a case you can rely on market mechanisms to handle. If Android users start demonstrating a willingness to pay for good design commensurate with the difficulty of producing good design for Android devices, there'll be a market opportunity there. Someone will get rewarded for providing people with what they're willing to pay for.

This leads into how Bowles sells the other argument short: he conflates design and graphic design when he address the "Android is hard to design for" argument. Design is, to borrow a famous phrasing, how it works. Sure, it was tough to do good graphic design for Gingerbread and it's much easier now. Great. However, the fragmentation and glacially-slow upgrades have a real cost here - to design the same functionality, may require spanning multiple API versions. The comparison to the diversity of Web browsers and viewers doesn't work because that diversity, relies on web standards. The equivalent of web standards that would allow an Android app to do responsive design in the manner of a web app, devices don't have or respect.

Fundamentally, it seems like Bowles doesn't get that the answer to his question is "because doing good design work on Android is more expensive and people pay less for it." Sure, you could ask designers to make speculative investments in Android, but I suspect that'll go about as well as asking people to make speculative investments of their professional time and skill usually goes. Professionals who respect their own time and worth, go where they can do good work and get paid well for it. Currently, that means they don't go to Android.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#35

Post by chroem »

georgemcbay wrote: post #24
taspeotis wrote: post #16

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".

I've been writing Android code for close to 3 years now and I can tell you the problem isn't you. Android layouts are like CSS in that eventually they warp your brain to the point where you can mostly understand them and be productive with them, but they are still kind of ridiculous and make doing things that should be relatively easy much harder than they ought to be. Sadly the whole way the layout system works seep…

Really? I picked up CSS in a few hours but I still can't begin to wrap my head around how to properly work with Android layouts.

I really wish Google would let people use HTML and CSS instead of that bizarre relational XML stuff.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#36

Post by Ologn »

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.

Eclipse (or Android Studio) is good for when you are getting your feet wet with Android. If you don't like using it there are alternatives.

I usually use Emacs or vi. The only thing I miss when not using Eclipse with the ADT plugin is after typing say "LinearLayout ll;" with Eclipse I can type Control-Shift-O and the LinearLayout class is automatically imported in the code. I miss this, but I kind of have this in Emacs with JDE - a Control-C-V-Z has similar behavior. I could probably do some more tool work on Emacs and make it even more automatic.

I do everything with emacs, vi, ant, astyle, adb, and the Android commands "android" and "monitor". Some people do Android in IntelliJ, some in Netbeans. Some use Sublime Text.

If you think Eclipse with ADT is bad for Android development now, you should have seen Eclipse/ADT at the end of 2009. Just getting the ADT plugin to work with Eclipse was a nightmare. Having seen the improvement since then, I guess it all seems less bad to me. Although I don't use Eclipse when I do Android programming, generally.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#37

Post by fallinghawks »

eropple wrote: post #23
tomasien wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eclipse is the default for most Java development, but I know fairly few serious Java developers who use it. Some do, I'm not saying they don't exist, but IntelliJ--of which Android Studio is a fork--is generally the go-to tool amongst the experienced, skilled Java folks I know. Double for Scala. (I used nothing but IDEA for Android work at my last job, for about eighteen months - Eclipse is certainly not required and…

Second this. Not to say I'm an experienced Java developer, but after trying both, I'm sticking with IntelliJ, which was introduced to me by a Google SSE who definitely favored it over Eclipse.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#38

Post by fpgeek »

sedev wrote: post #34

> The other replies were mostly variations on the theme that Android users don’t pay for apps, they don’t have data plans, you can’t monetise them easily, and designers are all iPhone users and don’t really understand Android users … Socially, excluding Android users seems almost prejudicial. Unlike Android is difficult, this isn’t about about mere convenience; it’s a value judgment on who is worth designing for. Put…

> The equivalent of web standards that would allow an Android app to do responsive design in the manner of a web app, devices don't have or respect.

Oh, really?

Let's take a look shall we:

1. Using new APIs if available and falling back gracefully if not: http://developer.android.com/training/basics/supporting-devi...

2. Adapting your layout and UI to each device based on screen size, density and other features: http://developer.android.com/training/multiscreen/index.html

3. Libraries to help use newer features while being backward-compatible: http://developer.android.com/tools/support-library/index.htm...

And so on. Looks to me like there's plenty of infrastructure to help building responsive apps if you want to.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#39

Post by cclogg »

"However, the growth patterns of Android are what give it such power. Android utterly dominates in emerging markets."

The last point there is an important one. In the US (and various other markets), iOS and Android are not that far apart in user count. In fact I believe in the US now, iOS is taking share back (albeit a minor share lol): http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2014/3/comSc...

But anyway, I've enjoyed reading the comments here, and I think the point about designers themselves being more mac-oriented (historically) is a pretty valid reason!

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#40

Post by whytaka »

Zigurd wrote: post #6

I was able to successfully train a designer to use the Android SDK's tools when appropriate, and check in graphical assets. In preparatory meetings I insisted the designer be in the room with the coders and product managers as I explained how Android is different. I taught them all how to use conditional layouts and how to test apps for good practices by changing font sizes to see if they really are geometry-independ…

As an app designer, I wouldn't mind a lesson myself!
Post reply on HN