This is a very opinionated rant on the thoughts after I got the Samsung Google Nexus S as my first Android phone and am trying to switch from the iPhone 3G S. I probably have missed something, so just flame the comments if there is something to flame about.
Philosophy
Android
Android philosophy is quite close to Linux philosophy. We have a lot of software, stuff is free, so there is mass. The stock software is a bit so so, but since everything is open and free somebody else can and probably will do a better application.
Okay! That’s cool, but if you’re NOT a NERD, but just a regular user, how much time will you spend to find the best software for something like email.
This is the Linux (and the Windows) problem: The stock software is somewhat usable but at least I get frustrated since they lack features. What does this mean is that you end up digging up the internet, install something, try it out and it’s crap. Yeah, crap – that’s what Android Marketplace is full as is Linux package repositories.
Android is a Linux.
iOS
So how does the iOS philosophy differ from the Android one? The difference is very simple – the default has to be good enough. If you buy an iPhone, the stock software is already so good that you in most cases don’t need better. They’re hardly perfect but in most cases you’re not going to be frustrated using them, or at least I’m not.
App Store vs. Marketplace
Marketplace
Let’s face it, Android marketplace is full of crap because nobody is looking after it. This is fairly similar thing on Linux all over, it’s really hard to find ANYTHING from there! Okay, a correction, you will find something, but it’s CRAP, if you exclude some few exceptions.
Marketplace relies on the same kind of idea as does App Store, user reviews. I don’t exactly know why this doesn’t work, but when I try finding something from the Marketplace most of the time the reviews, stars or comments, aren’t very helpful. I just end up trying things and wasting my time. Maybe this is because there’s so many (crappy) applications, that it’s just impossible for someone go through them all?
Of course it’s also nice to have all those applications free but that actually means that YOU, the user, has to work for finding the applications you’ll be willing to use, if you ever do.
How to make Marketplace better?
So how could we get the experience on the Marketplace better? I think there should be a community review process which would weed out the crappiest of the crap. Now there are multiple sites that do reviews on the applications but this should be somehow integrated with the Marketplace just because star rating with comments made with the phone are hardly enough.
The community model should be some sort of hybrid of the StackOverflow model with the current star rating and comments. There should be community moderators that look through the applications, they would get karma for going through the stuff and with more karma you could do more stuff on the review process.
Coming up with this model would be another blog post altogether…
Amazon Appstore
Of course now you ask: “What about Amazon Appstore?”. Well, my answer is pretty straightforward. I don’t know. It doesn’t work in Finland yet and I don’t know when it will work outside US. Maybe this is the saviour for the Android application discovery experience.
App Store
There’s a lot of pretty good applications in the App store. The quality stays always a bit better because somebody is actually keeping at least track of it. It’s of course not perfect since with moderation there’s always stupid rules on the content and some applications don’t get in because somebody at the App Store review team doesn’t like something or Apple doesn’t like something. Anyway, I prefer that somebody actually goes through the crap before it is sent to the general public, then I don’t have to work so much. I might miss out on something, that’s true, but at least I don’t get some of the horrific shit you can end up installing on the Marketplace.
Experience
So let’s agree that when I’m talking about experience and usability it’s of course only my exprience since I haven’t conducted any studies about it and don’t even claim to be any kind of expert at it.
iOS
I’ve been using iOS way longer than Android so of course I’m biased and some people might call me an Apple fanboy because of this but I don’t really see myself as such.
Apple has been leading the way of smart phone operating systems lately. There has been great innovation in the App Store and the execution of it, the simple and yet fairly powerful user interface. In addition iOS has a really good web experience, tight integration with the iTunes (in good and bad), really good stock applications and very rich set of applications in the App Store.
So of course when the setup is like this, it sounds like Android as operating system is starting off as an underdog and that has to be acknowledged. This said, I won’t be going on too much detail why I like the iOS, but I’ll go through on the next section what are my beefs with the Android and there you’ll also can see where the comparison favours the iOS.
Android
Somehow on the Android I feel that there’s not enough UX testing been done with it which can be partly due to the fact it’s meant as a platform for the manufacturers to build their experience on top of it. Anyway, I bought some what of a flagship product from the maker of the platform albeit the hardware was supplied by Samsung. The experience on the Google Nexus S should be top of the class, am I right?
Well, it isn’t. There are a lot of problems I noticed and yes some of them might seem small and irrelevant, but still they somehow annoyed me. I made a nice little list about them.
Problems
- Facebook application sync is disabled.
- Lack of shared controls for the media playback
- You can have multiple media sources overlapping and there’s no simple way of switching between.
- The stock email client
- (Re)moving multiple emails
- Filtering support (to be fair iOS doesn’t have this either)
- Notification sound mixing with current media playback
- Might not be a big thing to you but felt really choppy since iPhone has this.
- Podcasts
- There’s NO support as default.
- You can’t sync them from your computer.
- You have to keep track what you have listened with your computer.
- Downloading them with your phone drains the battery.
- Google Listen is BUGGY.
- Flash support
- Funny enough this seems to be a boon and a bane.
- Think about all of those nifty flash ads on the mobile.
- Thank goodness you can fairly easily disable it and enable it when needed.
- The browser
- There’s lag when you’re scrolling pages.
- Somehow the zoom isn’t quite as good as on the iOS.
- The experience just feel less smooth than the iOS. (Sorry about the vagueness, but the analysis would be another post altogether.)
- The widgets
- They make the UI lag.
- Facebook and Twitter widgets are just a bit crappy.
- There’s just not many widgets that are really fleshed out.
- The notifications
- For some reason Facebook notifications and Twitter notifications aren’t as reliable as on the iPhone.
- Transitions and animations
- The transitions and animations are way smoother on the iPhone.
- Scrolling
- Scrolling experience depends on the application. On the iPhone I get a fairly consistent scrolling experience on lists, but not here.
- Synchronisation
- Everything syncs to the cloud.
- It’s pretty much effortless for the user.
- Where is my information? Is it safe?
And more crap on Android experience is that the Spotify application on the Android SUCKS because at the moment it still crashes due to “too many” playlists.
Plusses
So that this doesn’t sound too sour, let’s add some good things about the Android experience.
- The notification area
- Provides a simple and neat view on the all of the notifications.
- This is probably the best feature of the Android OS.
- The widgets are kind of cool.
- I really like the flash light widget that uses the flash led.
- The weather + news ticker is nice.
- The wi-fi, bluetooth, location and brightness control widget is handy when you want to control the battery life.
- Free software
- Having a lot of free software is a boon and bane.
- Less limitations
- Google is way more liberal on what you can do with the phone.
- Synchronisation
- Everything syncs to the cloud.
- It’s pretty much effortless for the user.
Conclusions
So you could say that the Android experience for me hasn’t been the smoothest. I’m at the moment lacking a nice way of listening to podcasts. And since the phone I got had a defective headphone socket which I know because the headset remote on the headset I got with the phone isn’t working, I haven’t been too pleased with it.
Even if I take that out and just look at the user experience on the Android and the iPhone you can see that on the iPhone there’s way more polish. It’s not just about eye-candy but the quality of how things are done. I actually prefer to get a really good and thought out way of doing something than just some way of doing it.
On the Android you a lot of times you have some way of doing the thing you want to do, but it can be horrible, but that’s okay, since you’ll get used to it or maybe someone will make it better. In a way there’s always hope for something better that doesn’t exactly lie on one company but that’s also a problem if nobody really takes the responsibility.
Android user
If you really want to spend time with your phone customizing it, finding the best software to do the one thing you want do and you want to have flash, get Android. It’s not a really thought out product but you’ll be able to do most of the stuff adequately, but you’ll be missing out lot of the cool content in the App Store. Then again you will have a lot of free applications, better notification UI and widgets.
iPhone user
If you want to use your phone mostly on defaults, are more interested in getting things done and are willing to accept the fact that Apple will tell you what you can and can’t do, get iPhone. Most of the time they’ll provide you good tools on doing the basics but sometimes you’re just stuck with defaults and there’s nothing you can do to make it better, besides maybe jailbreak. You’ll have all the cool apps at the App Store but you’ll have way less free options.
What will I do?
For now I’m going to choose Android for a while since I already bought the product and I see that they’ve at least tried to innovate where iOS hasn’t been very exciting lately. I’m a weird combination though since I don’t really want to do a lot of customisations but most of the time prefer defaults and just want to use my device. I still see that there’s potential in Android but it’s still behind iOS. I hope they catch up. And I won’t be giving up my iPhone either…