On May 11th i wrote small blog entry about changes i’ve noticed around android UI in the apps created by google. Apparently it was a good timing. Because on May 12th , android team posted in their blog “Twitter for android : closer look at android’s evolving UI patterns” which was followed by google io session Android UI design patterns . Key word here is evolving. If you put it through bs translator it means - hey guys we screwed up but willing to improve.

For a record, i like twitter app look and google I/O app look. I’ve met with some UI folks at IO and i think that they are  excellent. And the fact that they fixing things is great. However ( this is that big fancy BUT usually follows by “it sucks” ) it shows clearly where google is different from apple. It really shows that Google is company of engineers and Apple is all about design and building beautiful things. If  Apple UX team would come to Jobs after pretty much year and a half and said “um.. you know how we told you we have a good design for iPhone ? Well we don’t and need to change that” i’m pretty sure that different people will be changing that. In fact it could be happening at google as well, as Google hired Palm lead UI person .

Now things are not just inferior to iPhone, they confusing. For app designers, who want’s to follow platform best practices, for developers who implement those things and for end users, who end up with bunch of apps that not using same patterns though platform. Some apps look like iPhone, some like old android, some like new , and some look just like crap . Even after using new twitter for a month, i still press menu in search for refresh. I still expect that if i do long-press something is gonna happen. Basically current state of UI - is a mess. I really hope that Matias going to fix it and soon. With something that will be able to last longer than a year. To be fair the crappy apps part is applied to iPhone as well. It’s not UI problem. You want good UI - first two people on the team should be Product Designer and Artist. 

 

 

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