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

61–70 of 144 posts

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#61

Post by mrxd »

> My uncharitable interpretation for this class of responses is simple laziness

What does this mean? If I was uncharitable, I'd say it sounds like he wants designers and developers to work nights and weekends. If there's a business case for supporting Android, then you need more headcount. If not, calling the team lazy is unnecessary.

> I do hope, given tech’s rhetoric about changing the world and disrupting outdated hierarchies, that we don’t really think only those with revenue potential are worth our attention.

Most designers work for for-profit companies where revenue potential is an extremely important consideration, irrespective of whether they personally sympathize with the poor.

There's a valid point buried in here somewhere. It's possible that companies are underinvesting in Android because they've underestimate the opportunity, but blaming this on designers preferring iOS is just weird. A decision as important as the choice of platform is rarely left up to the personal preference of the designer.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#62

Post by chetanahuja »

runewell wrote: post #57
georgemcbay wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bemo…

So you're saying it's easier to design on iOS then.

It's "easier" in the same sense that it's easier to hack up a quick website in PHP than it is to write kernel driver.. (though the magnitude of the difference is not as great as that example picked for illustration).

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#63

Post by burstmode »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #53
Ologn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ema…

I'm pretty sure the idea is to get more GUI-based, not less. Telling a designer to use vi instead of Eclipse for UI is pretty hilarious.

Telling anybody to use vi at all is pretty hilarious.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#64

Post by chetanahuja »

andric wrote: post #2

Android doesn’t drive early adoption, so it would make sense to leave it out while you let iOS “take the cake” so to speak, for a while at least. Android, being the dominant platform with a huge mass of people in the early-to-late majority part of the bell curve, makes sense for when you want to scale.

"Android doesn’t drive early adoption"

Surely you're going to provide data or some citation to back that huge assertion.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#65

Post by lvturner »

I one thing to consider, is that emerging markets also generally spend less money on applications, and good design is expensive.

I've seen two identical apps (games specifically) on Android and iOS, the iOS versions made considerably more revenue than the Android version.

So I guess the commonly asked question is "Will we make the same amount of money with a cheaper design?"

Obviously this is a bit anecdotal, but I think it's a contributing factor.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#66

Post by nysv »

dannyr wrote: post #49

Designers don't take Android seriously because they are mostly iOS users. It's hard to build on something you cannot really relate to.

There also seems to an element of elitism among Apple fanboys, thinking their design is the only one that matters.

"Android users obviously picked their device for other reasons than design, so it doesn't have to look as good."

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#67

Post by sbuk »

joelgrus wrote: post #33

Why don't designers make their stacked area charts really oddly proportioned and with muddled palettes so that they're difficult to read? Oh, wait, they do!

The chart is from a well known and respected former Nokia analyst who, incidentally, has a degree in computer science. I guess the question should be; "Why do people on the internet consistently mouth off without checking their facts, which are always a mere search away?"

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#68

Post by Nilzor »

chroem wrote: post #35
georgemcbay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WebView is your friend.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#69

Post by hanspeide »

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…

"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 differs from my experience. I've work on several large app projects (> 200 000 downloads), and the Android versions have been ready before or at the same time as their iOS counterparts.

Also, the good apps are not made using IB. Fine for prototyping, sure, but not suitable for real world use. Feel free to prove me wrong, and name IB success stories.

Smells like good old FUD spreading to me.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#70

Post by sbuk »

nysv wrote: post #66
dannyr wrote: post #49

Designers don't take Android seriously because they are mostly iOS users. It's hard to build on something you cannot really relate to.

There also seems to an element of elitism among Apple fanboys, thinking their design is the only one that matters. "Android users obviously picked their device for other reasons than design, so it doesn't have to look as good."

>..."element of elitism among Apple fanboys,"

Let's not use pejoratives. While we are at it, let's not project our own assumptions as points of fact.

Post reply on HN