I'm an iOS developer and an Android developer, and I'm honestly disgusted by the level of excuses that is made for the horrible UX on Android. It reminds me of 10 years ago, when the meme on /. was "The Year Of Desktop Linux is always Next Year(TM)".
This is more than a little hyperbolic. Sure, the animations may not run at 30fps all the time. Some animations running at 15fps != horrible UX. I am an iOS dev as well but use an Android phone and just completely disagree on it having poor UX.
Anecdotes:
- Whilst using my Nexus S, it rings. I pull it out of my pocket, only to discover I can't answer it because there's a keyboard over the Answer/Decline buttons. Later, I realize I must have pressed and held on the Menu button long enough while pulling the phone out of my pocket to force the keyboard to popover the Answer/Decline buttons. But why the heck is this possible even? It vaguely reminds me Joel Spolsky's article on the Windows shutdown menu - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html .
- I want to make it so there's momentum/inertial/bounce scrolling in a text view. This is impossible. Why? So phones that still have trackballs don't have whacky scrolling behavior going on for them. But the ListView has inertial scrolling. How the heck can I possible explain this to my client without sounding foolish or lazy?
- I want to animated a cell disappearing from a ListView. Again, impossible. The solutions mentioned on StackOverflow ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3928193/how-to-animate-ad... ) (BTW, the Android presence on StackOverflow is abysmal), in order, and summarized: 1) Rewrite the class yourself because Android is open 2) Some hacky drawing solution that isn't a good idea. 3) Wait till Adobe's dev tools get faster on Android. 4) Re-implement the class from scratch yourself.
I understand now that Honeycomb has much better animation facilities, but we're not seeing that on phones. And when we do, the problem with carriers + manufacturers holding sway means whatever apps I build won't see any improvements on phones until Ice Cream is released and manufacturers ship phones with it. We're talking June or July at this point, right? For basic animation. That was in iOS 1.0. In June 2007.
Huh? I'm running Android Gingerbread on a Nexus One, and when the phone rings, I see the usual "unlock" screen, with one option for answering, and one for ignoring the call. There's no way to get a keyboard, no matter which buttons I press.
Is your phone fully awake and unlocked in your pocket? Is there something weird about Gingerbread (or the buttons) on the Nexus S?
While honeycomb is android 3 -- it is a total rebuild.
However, to your point - the UX should be first in ALL of the android space's mind -- ESPECIALLY given that they dont have the design (UX/UI) powerhouse behind them that is Apple.
I know from my visits to the Verizon store to play with one that they hype it up as "completely new OS", but other than making the hardware buttons software finally, it looks and acts identically. As technical people, I think we both know that this is a revision of Android, not a completely new OS.
More to your point - iPad ran iOS 3.2 - the 3rd revision of iOS. The Xoom is running Android 3 - the 3rd revision of Android.
