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

111–120 of 144 posts

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#111

Post by Oletros »

wisty wrote: post #90

> 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”. How about "Android users want a phone, not apps". If you want a phone, you get an Android. If you want apps, you get an iPhone. Look at the stats for web use. In 2012, there…

> Look at the stats for web use. In 2012, there was more Android Webkit use of cellular (more users?), but far more Mobile Safari if you included WiFi.

Web use is not the same that app use.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#112

Post by tomwilson »

hanspeide wrote: post #69
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 p…

Saying good apps are not made using IB, and that its not suitable for real use, sounds like FUD to me too :)

Sure you need to leave IB sometimes (or a lot of the time - depending on the app), but if you are coding every little view by hand... well you have more time on your hands (and budget?) than I do :P

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#113

Post by thomasahle »

yaeger wrote: post #84
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…

I haven't checked on Android as a platform in quite a long time but it is amazing to see that things still are exactly where they were when I last checked. Android == Google == Free Software That still seems to be the basic idea many users have. It was always weird to see a platform with such high market share compared to iOS can not even get close to what iOS rakes in as revenue and mobile traffic. If one looks at t…

It seems to me that we have to go more than a year back, since iOS generated more web traffic than android: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#De...

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#114

Post by stefan_kendall3 »

I'm not going to get acquired by Facebook for releasing my powerlifting app on android. So I truly do need to consider the "Android users are poor" statement.

They are.

I did some math, though, and the time it will take me to learn android and build the android app should be worth my time if I can convert a decent percentage of my old android paid users over to the designed, native app.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#116

Post by stefan_kendall3 »

aeberbach wrote: post #106
sigsergv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Congratulations on the most ridiculous comment on HN today. How many apps on the app store was that now, 1,000,000+ according to the admittedly non-authoritative Wikipedia. And all of them created with hex editors, you would have us believe. Not the completely unusable Xcode.

I find Xcode pretty awful and instead use AppCode with Xcode open at the same time.

Xcode 5 finally makes it easy to run single unit tests. Before this, you had to create a schema to run a single test, which was several clicks and possibly some typing. Now it's click and run, which is lovely.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#117

Post by stefan_kendall3 »

rikthevik wrote: post #19

Has anyone seen good results with the new Qt mobile tools? I realize that it won't look quite native - but Qt's got a pretty good track record, and if I could write apps using C++ instead of Java, and get some cross-platform capability, I'd certainly be interested.

I've been burned by cross-platform tools. I tried Sencha Touch, and it was a horrible 2-year mistake.

Something that compiles might do better, but at the end of the day you really want to be calling into the cocoa touch framework directly. If Qt lets you do this, great. If it doesn't, look elsewhere.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#118

Post by ch0wn »

berrypicker wrote: post #105
ch0wn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android Studio is way better in every conceivable way the old Eclipse-based ADT and I haven't had speed problems with the Android emulator since they released the x86 images. Have you actually developed for Android in the last year?

I never used Android Studio, only Eclipse, since it was what everybody else was using. This was my experience from around 2012/13 sorry for sharing it but it put me off Android.

Things have drastically improved. You should give the new toolchain another try. It's far from perfect, but a huge improvement.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#120

Post by anuraj »

We apply unidesign (works equally well on iOS and Android) for all our apps these days. But we take iOS as the base for design. This is because Android still do not have the design consistency of iOS. Also Android devices come in variety of shapes and sizes and resolutions making it difficult to visualize end result.
Post reply on HN