Hacker News Reader

Comment by gareim | Hacker News Reader

What about that part where Samsung was basically like "Oh, Apple's icons look like this using this light effect. We should definitely make our icons look like that too."

What part of that is innovative and advancing technology? No, they just wanted to piggyback off of Apple's success and make money that way. Which I don't think is fair.

Just ask any app developer who enjoys success. The Chinese clones eat away at revenue and potential markets. It degrades the experience for everyone when one party leeches rather than innovates.

I always say that Microsoft came up with their own UI that looks and works great. There isn't only one solution to this.

View on HN

Okay, and do you think having a glossy effect on your icons is important in any way? Is that the magical secret sauce key to selling millions of phones? And, even if it was, do you think it's a significant enough "innovation" to warrant any kind of protection? While we're at it, do you think that if I comb through every Apple product, application, and website, there isn't at least one minor element that a designer lifted from some pre-existing design found elsewhere? Be realistic.

Finally, a "clone" is different than minor design similarities. I specifically mentioned this in my post. Did Samsung copy every detail of the iPhone to make an indistinguishable product? No. They made an easily-distinguishable competitive product. I don't see how you can bring Chinese app clones into this discussion. Samsung's goal was never to confuse consumers.

Btw, Microsoft didn't come up with their own UI design from scratch. They were heavily influenced by Apple's original OS designs. For the past two decades, Jobs repeatedly accused Windows of being a copy. Look it up.

I apologize for any confusion I caused by being vague.

Firstly, I meant for Windows Phone 7. Not Windows in general.

Secondly, yes, Samsung did indeed try to make a product that appeared similar to Apple's. http://i.imgur.com/TmUj2.jpg

Sure, there are elements of design that endure and designers draw inspiration from that, but Samsung's copying was just shameless. Look to HTC for another example of an Android OEM that didn't have to make their products look so similar to Apple ones.

The glossy effect, and all the other UI niceties took thousands of hours of research to perfect. You think they just mocked up the design in a single alpha release and shipped it as is? No, good UI takes tons of work, not just development but user testing and dozens of feedback cycles. Hard to develop and get right (so that it feels so effortless) yet so easy to copy. How do we protect that?

What about that part where Apple basically looked at the pull-down notifications in Android and just copied it in iOS 5? Oh wait, OUR soldiers are freedom fighters, but THEIRS are despicable terrararists, right?

If you look at the styling of the pull-down notifications on iOS and Android, they actually look different. ICS pull downs looks significantly different than iOS. However, if you google images of samsung galaxy products, you'll see that many of their interfaces are identical.

For example, take a look at the samsung galaxy keyboard, the buttons & layout are identical to the iphone, why would you throw away the Android keyboard and replace it with something that looks identical to the iphone? The galaxy dock connector is also identical to the iphone, so much that one can actually plug the samsung connector into an iphone. Personally, I like the usb connectors better -- they're more versatile and I don't need to carry a bunch of specialized cables around, but samsung would rather copy apple than pick a sane default.

Glossy icons worth $1B judgement? Nope.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com