Hacker News Reader

Comment by d_r | Hacker News Reader

iOS comes with a handy set of UI controls that look decent even without customization. You can use the default UITableView, for instance (looking at the Meebo screenshot) and get the nice look-and-feel out of the box. This especially helps a low-budget dev like myself.

Apple showcase of the controls that come out-of-the box and various ways to tweak them: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userex...

Default Android controls for some reason sport a more "circa-1990 MS DOS" look. The developers need to actually invest time to re-skin the components or make their own to get a modern look. This is made slightly more difficult if you want to support multiple screen sizes/resolutions. As such, many Android apps sadly seem to end up with the default look.

(I have written apps for both platforms.)

View on HN

Do you think there would be a niche for creating good looking high quality UI controls for Android? Or will it still be a too big hassle to implement them?

I'm sure devs would love a snazzy UI framework that "just works" on popular screen sizes. I, for one, would use it. If it was open-source and distributed under a permissive enough license, even better.

UI controls are a contributing factor to Android’s ugliness. I’ll argue that Android doesn’t have a worthy equivalent to Xcode’s Interface Builder.

I have documented that iOS comes with scores of fonts available for Developers at http://iOSFonts.com at the same time (and someone correct me if I’m wrong) Android only has Droid Sans.

In many cases devs — and especially designers — for the mobile market are dog-fooding; they will likely use the iOS version of the app they make because they own the hardware themselves.

Google sets a low bar and a poor example for UX.

There are other factors, too. Some of which are that there is a higher ROI on iOS apps, a larger market share (when you count iPod touch as part of your audience), and an audience more likely to be concerned with quality.

I think the screen resolution issue is easily overlooked - my wife had the Sony X10 mini, with a screen resolution of 240 x 320, and a lot of other cheaper Android phones have a similar resolution.

If an app developer wants their phone to work on the whole range of Android phones, the app interface needs to cope with these very low resolution screens.

Agreed, just it adds another "I need to test this" configuration for devs. Have you found that many apps don't support this resolution?

Google actually tracks screen sizes of devices that access Android Market:

http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/screens.htm...

It appears that 240x320 (small + low density) accounts for 2.3% of users.

While unrelated to UI, another very handy page tracks Android versions in use out there. It looks like 2.2 has become the most common version in the last month: http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...

One note of caution; while the platform version thing is up to date, the screens one is from August 2010. 240x320 is probably an even smaller minority now, as it only really showed up in Sony's 'mini' devices, which did not sell well and seem to have been effectively discontinued; there are no released plans for a current-gen one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com