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Some of these are really nice. I'm curious how many of these are Android-specific though. Path looks pretty similar on iOS and so do FourSquare, Flipboard etc. Which of these are examples of good mobile design that holds itself on various platforms (iOS, Android etc.) and which are unique to Android?
is it bad if i find it inconsistent, annoying to use, etc? I mean, it is pretty (well, arguably, most of them are), but, the buttons are all over the place and everyone seems to have it's own UI plastered on top of more or less "android ui compliant" stuff.
is it bad if i find it inconsistent, annoying to use, etc? I mean, it is pretty (well, arguably, most of them are), but, the buttons are all over the place and everyone seems to have it's own UI plastered on top of more or less "android ui compliant" stuff.
Look closely though. You'll notice the ActionBar is extremely prevalent in these. The ActionBar is actually one of those few Android teachable moments; I wish Apple did this as well, as consistently, or as themably. I've used a lot of these apps (and I am sad to not see Pattrn up there!) and it's very much the case that they have a fairly consistent set of "touch semantics" that screenshots don't reveal. E.g., Tap upper right corner to configure; long press for edit; swipe horizontally to navigate; long press on text fields to engage c/p editor bar.
For better or worse, Android's toolkits offer a lot more guidance to the programmer on "the right way" than Apple's do (a great example of this that bleeds into UI is how Android has a ton of Loader patterns and iOS doesn't have anything nearly so sophisticated in its core lib). So in some respects, Android is actually slightly better off; the bigger toolkit means you get some superior consistency. The recent iterations (and backported support) framework strongly encourages you to do things like support long presses and swipe navigation and backpane navigation.
None of these general aesthetics are bad, but the inconsistency seems to be an issue. (Actually, a few of them do look bad to me, like Rdio, with the very dated "app home screen" that looks like it was copied from the old Facebook iOS app.)
This site contains a stack overflow bug which crashes Firefox and IE9 on Windows. Flagged.
is it bad if i find it inconsistent, annoying to use, etc? I mean, it is pretty (well, arguably, most of them are), but, the buttons are all over the place and everyone seems to have it's own UI plastered on top of more or less "android ui compliant" stuff.
This is a complaint about Mobile in general, not Android. People bitch about fragmentation (and it is a bit painful), but in the regard of "everyone has their own UX on top of the system default" iOS is in exactly as bad a boat, if not worse. Some of the most popular iOS apps take their UX off in crazy directions (a common example: Tweetbot). Look closely though. You'll notice the ActionBar is extremely prevalent in…
We just need the app makers to catch up. Foursquare, for instance, has been redesigned and looks great. However, their widgets haven't been touched and look awful by comparison. Spotify has done a far better job of updating everything at once.
Some more themes are on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/androidthemes/