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Comment by cvursache | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting claim to say that iOS has aged poorly. I tend to agree that the use of skeumorphic design does make the standard apps look a bit out-of-date, but is that really a problem? How many powerusers are really bothered by this? If you don't like the Podcast app, just get Downcast. If you don't like Calendar, just get Fantastical. And using your claim that skeumorphism helps smartphone newcomers adopt the platform more easily, isn't the current situation a sort of a win-win for the iOS ecosystem? Newcomers get an easy entry and more versatile users can enjoy the great results of third-party developers.

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It would be much less of a problem if iOS allowed one to actually replace stock apps with new ones. There's no way to make GMail my default mail app, Chrome my default browser, etc.

Lack of intents is also a serious problem, apps have to specifically support sharing to each source.

A related issue is the lack of system accounts. One has to log in to each app separately, even if many of them use the same account.

On the other hand Android allows nonsensical sharing options - there's no way to launch the email app, you have launch a ACTION_SEND_MULTIPLE which will launch Skype, or GMail or Mail or various IM apps.

And why should the developer have to care if I want to send something via Gmail, Skype, or carrier pigeon? As long as Android abstracts the data properly within the Intent, the target app should be irrelevant.

That's true, but the Android approach for accomplishing it is kind of horrible. For one, far too many apps respond to message types that don't really make sense to me. I don't know that this problem is avoidable with freedom, but the lists of available apps for any particular action are often long and very confusing.

I have witnessed this confusion with users, and it really hurts the platform in a lot of cases, IMO.

I can select one to be the default "always", but this doesn't work well either. If there are five applications that can receive a particular intent, my selection of "always" will be lost every single time that ANY of those five applications are updated. So, in practice, my "Always" selection typically only lasts a couple of weeks.

There HAS to be a better way.

I'm not sure you're correct here. A developer can specify a particular package to launch Gmail or the stock mail app, something like:

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW); intent.setPackage("com.adobe.reader");

Would open the adobe pdf reader for instance.

That said this is hardly desirable from a users perspective.

Oh, there are a lot of serious problems with iOS. After 3 years on the platform, you start to see that restriction-based badness all over the place. But one shouldn't forget that Apple has built an incredible product with one of the most secure OSs in the world and offers one of the best UI SDKs available. Those facts alone make me want to cut Apple some slack from being such assholes when allowing users to make more low-level decisions.

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