Four months with Android: reflections, grievances and some tenuous metaphors bundled up into a weighty tome
That’s not to say I didn’t learn a lot. I have a solid grasp of what makes Android Android, the ins-and-outs of the OS, and, yes, there are even a few really great features I will miss as I transition back to iOS.
But at the end of the day I’m left with mostly a bad taste in my mouth. What follows is a summation of four months exclusively using Android.
Ryan Heise completes his “Dinner with Android” experiment.
I considered doing a similar experiment when my contract with my iPhone 3GS finished. I ended up not doing it since my iPhone still worked great, so the only reason would be to play with something I knew I would be giving away once the next iPhone came along. I’m glad I didn’t, as I feel from following Ryan’s blog that I would have reached the exact same conclusion.
The key thing keeping me away from Android is the user experience, though it certainly isn’t the only thing. Ryan highlights what I think is the crucial element to the iOS experience:
These are digital devices that are trying to be analogous to the real world. […] using your fingers to manipulate what are essentially buttons is something we are accustomed to. The problem is that it needs to feel like you’re manipulating real objects when you’re actually pantomiming across a piece of glass.
The iPhone got this right. Presses, swipes, scrolls and zooms work and feel so good because they happen close to realtime and to a 1:1 action.
With Android, at least on my Nexus S, nothing feels this good. Everything still feels like an input that is creating a reaction. You do something with your fingers, the OS interrupts it, and stuff happens on the screen. The performance isn’t there, and to me it feels bad.
Before the iPhone, touchscreen interfaces were bad. They lacked the immediacy that made things feel like you were directly manipulating them. I remember discussing the concept of touchscreens with people when the iPhone first arrived, and a surprising number of them disliked the concept of a touchscreen based solely on their previous experiences with bad ones. Yet once they actually tried the iPhone interface, it was clear they were rethinking their opinions: this was exactly like a touchscreen should be.
Apple focused on this immediacy aspect intently, yet it seems to be something that Android has yet to realise. On iOS, it feels like you interact directly with your content. On Android, it seems like there’s a layer in between.
Another factor I feel impacts the Android user experience is the huge differences in screen sizes and resolutions. Ryan doesn’t touch on this, but I really think the limited variety of iOS screens (that is, 2 sizes) makes for far better usability design. When you interact directly with app content, designers need to know exactly how that content is sized in proportion to your finger. With iOS, they do: users are either using an iPad-sized screen or an iPhone-sized screen. With Android, this seems to be a really hard thing to do. Designers can’t make pixel-perfect apps if they are always being resized.
I know some people go with Android precisely because they offer different screen sizes than iPhones, and that’s a valid choice. But app usability is bound to suffer in an environment of multiple screen sizes and resolutions, even more so with touch devices than we’ve seen in desktop computers. While bigger screens are enough of a draw for some, the compromises in user experience are unacceptable for me.
So that is the crucial reason I choose iOS over Android. As a fanatic for good usability, Android just isn’t for me. I can see the attraction it holds for a some people, in the same way I can see the attraction Linux holds for some people. But to me, user experience is the single most important feature of a product, and I’m not willing to compromise that for any secondary feature.
