I can’t help but feel Google’s only consistency is in their trying to be clean, cool, and innovative, but not actually getting the details right, and ending up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great.
I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design. Apple can do it, which leads me to believe the ability to pull it off is largely cultural. Something or someone in Apple demands design that is relatable, good-looking, and consistent, and Google simply doesn’t have the same driving force.
Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.
(Edit: And to be clear, I mean Google’s design implementation in its entirety, especially beyond Android, including this very webpage which describes their new design.)
To be honest this just sounds like you're used to whatever Apple is doing and nothing Google would do (except outright copy iOS) would feel "ok" for you.
That's fine - we get used to stuff and rant when it changes in ways we don't expect. But the beta on my Android phone looks amazing and IMO better than iPadOS I have on a tablet.
> To be honest this just sounds like you're used to whatever Apple is doing and nothing Google would do (except outright copy iOS) would feel "ok" for you.
I've used an Android phone (including 2 Nexus 5x and a Pixel 3a, my current one) my whole life and always thought it looked okay, but not great.
I've had an OnCall iPhone for a few months though, and everything just looks way more polished, sane, and even comfortable. The animations are smoother. The colors are more beautiful. The content density is better. And mainly, everything looks less generic.
It's a feeling and I'm only a sample size of 1, but I don't think "you're just used to it" is the correct answer here.
I disagree. You really have to appreciate the scale of Apple’s efforts, and look beyond iOS, which everybody always gets fixated on. This is much broader than “I prefer how iOS looks”. Their documentation, hardware, software, marketing, audio communications, videos and commercials, stores, clothing, packaging, etc. exude consistency and extraordinary care to visual design. Apple’s design is pervasive and truly their identity. As I said elsewhere, they’re not perfect, but I’d claim with enough effort and without any logical gymnastics, we could measure this vague idea to be at least an order of magnitude greater than Google’s.
I work extensively with Android and Apple iOS/macOS (as part of mobile development and simply as a user of hardware) and I think your claim about Apple is pretty much disconnected from reality. As soon as you step outside the marketing veneer, there's plenty of Apple that is really far from "pervasive" of their "identity". Try straying a bit outside the most commonly used documentation pages, most commonly used customer journeys or even use macOS for extended bit of time and you'll see how your claim simply doesn't hold up.
I feel you're just buying way too much into the Apple marketing schtick.
> Try straying a bit outside the most commonly used documentation pages, most commonly used customer journeys or even use macOS for extended bit of time and you'll see how your claim simply doesn't hold up
I've experienced this recently, as a competent (DSLR) photographer trying to find out what I could do with the camera on my new iPhone Pro. I picked up more by browsing TikTok than from Apple's own material. One example was how to create long-exposure photographs from a 'live' photo. The function was actually discoverable through the iOS interface but I wouldn't have thought to try it in the way it was being used in TikTok tutorial.
(whether the long exposure effect is comparable with the equivalent from a dedicated camera is a different question)
I don’t think you’re right, but what’s more interesting to me is just how much our opinions seem to diverge! I’m a developer as well, I use Linux (Debian with StumpWM) as my daily driver, and Mac for work. I’m pretty familiar with Macs, macOS, and iOS I’d say.
There could be so many reasons why we diverge, but I suspect we’d probably disagree on what we consider a “design philosophy” or “the details” in the first place.
Maybe it’s true that I only see the “common” things (and it’s great we agree that the “common” things are consistent!), but I’m curious where you see seriously inconsistent or plainly bad visual design at the proverbial fray that doesn’t exist in other ecosystems of this scale.
with every release macos introduces design elements that are inconsistent with apples own design language, and/or simply horrible (like the notifications icon in preferences _with_ a dot).
esp big sur moved in a big way to a more fisher price look.
that it all seems more consistent than all the rest is just a sad statement more about them than apple...
Nah. I've never used any Apple products besides occasionally using someone's iPhone. I'm not used to the UX and to the gestures, but the interface is strikingly consistent. There's still so much clutter in Android. Fortunately, on Android you can customize most things, but Google is restricting more and more what apps can actually touch.
I've had a work iPhone 7 for years now and I'm still entirely confused by its UI due entirely to inconsistency. Where are my apps? Certainly not organized in a handy alphabetical app drawer, they're just randomly arrayed over multiple home screens in whatever order they were installed in, requiring effort to organize and then memorize where every single one is, or requiring search using the keyboard (slower particularly when you don't quite remember the name of the app).
The fact that I can never figure out in any given app how the back button is supposed to work (is it in the taskbar? or at the top of the screen? or am I supposed to swipe from the left?) or where the settings can be (sometimes in the app, sometimes in the Settings app) is deeply confusing.
Sometimes when the keyboard is up, swiping down from the top closes it, sometimes it scrolls. I find that I genuinely have no idea what's going to happen whenever I tap anywhere. The keyboard decides to just change words using autocorrect far more aggressively than my SwiftKey on Android.
Maybe one day I'll learn how to use iOS, but I know that it's definitely not "strikingly consistent".
That just shows "Siri Suggestions" and I have to type in the box. I don't want to search, keyboards on phones are universally bad. I want an alphabetized list.
> Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.
Disagree. I've repeatedly had to help my older relatives out with awful UX failures on Gmail or basic apps (think: the phone app) on their Android phones. As recently as a couple weeks ago. Usually it takes me a while to figure out what's going on. They have no chance whatsoever. One thing they consistently seem to get wrong is having god-awful visual hierarchies for UI elements, and not labeling things. That on top of "flat design" tending to make it hard to tell what the hell anything means or is.
(Apple, for their part, is getting increasingly bad on this front and have been since iOS 7, but mostly that's about discoverability for moderately-advanced functionality, not [except rarely] extremely basic UX fails that even this non-UX-expert developer recognizes as terrible)
[EDIT] it doesn't help that every time they upgrade, it seems like everything's totally different and layouts & UI paradigms have been redesigned from the ground up. This despite my steering them to fairly basic, vanilla-Android phones.
Yeah... I don't know if this works the same on Android, but on iOS I find the Google Docs app ridiculously confusing to the point where I often find myself clicking back and forth by accident through various dialogs in a loop trying to get to the "I just want to edit this document" step as it is so not what my brain expects that unless I stop entirely and stare at it and go "what was the stupid thing they expected me to click on at this point?" I just automatically click the wrong thing every time. Like, there is even a dialog that pops up in one of the loops I often get caught in with a "cancel" button that seriously cancels my attempt to cancel something, which my brain just can't wrap itself around fast enough :(.
I not-infrequently see Google UI on major consumer-facing products that would have gotten me (gently) slapped down by "third-tier" designers, product managers, and UX folks—hell, even some of my fellow developers—instantly if I'd presented them. People making 1/3 or less what Googlers make (yes, in the US). There's something organizationally wrong about Google, I think, that causes them to turn out products that are, in very visible ways, sub-par even for the kinds of small-fish places I've worked. I don't know what the cause is, but whatever it is isn't producing only minor or subtle errors.
Honestly from the outside looking in when you look at the big picture I don’t find it that much of a mystery. Long term plans are a unified model of computing under the Fuschia umbrella which is going to run everywhere from iot to servers. I don’t think they are subtle about wanting to control the entire stack of computing.
All the pieces are already in place (in various early stage forms) to make that move eventually from Android and Linux to Fuschia.
Additionally, I think everyone sees Flutter for web as some kind of joke right now but it seems pretty clear to me that this too is an early stage play to kill the idea of “native apps that live inside a closed garden App Store environment”.
I think we are close to seeing a world where the internet (as most people use it) is going to be moving away from the traditional document based browser approach to something a bit more app centric before long.
I find things like the Chrome team’s project Fugu suddenly make a LOT more sense when you start looking elsewhere at other things that seem unrelated at first (K8s, Fuschia and a few others come to mind).
They are all aiming to meet in the middle before long. People are already saying Safari is the new IE for example and I think that is about to become much more apparent in the next couple of years.
Eh kind of but you are mixing the OS with the application framework to make it look like more things exist.
PWA for ChromeOS,
Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform),
JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out).
So really it's three.
PWAs, Flutter, and Jetpack Compose.
Of which I think PWAs rightly exist alongside a native solution.
Flutter is sort of the odd one out and not sure where it will be long term. Although it's becoming more clear Fuchsia is probably going to be for IoT devices, so I could see Flutter being used as an application framework for them (which IMHO makes a lot of sense.)
>PWA for ChromeOS, Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform), JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out). So really it's three.
I don't think the parents point is that all those are frameworks.
Rather that they have two many frameworks and platforms, with no coherent unified platform strategy (Apple's iOS, macOS, ipadOS, watchOS are all the same under the hood, and their UI frameworks are also unified or getting there fast).
Listing 5 items and having vs between them clearly puts them against each other.
And that seems more like a marketing issue, under the hood there actually are differences between macOS and iOS. Catalyst hopes to fix this but it's still pretty rocky imho. Google also did something similar with running Android apps on chromeOS.
iPadOS, iOS and watchOS would be the same for Android phones, tablets and watches. So it doesn't seem like a fair comparison here.
I don't see Apple being big in the web space as much so Google really wanting to push PWAs vs Apple's stance is different. Although Apple seems to be fine with PWAs to a degree, so it would be the same for them too.
Apple really doesn't seem to care to support things outside their ecosystem (it doesn't benefit them like it does Google.) So you probably aren't going to see a multiplatform library from them.
I always thought Dart/Flutter was a hedge against Oracle shutting down Java-usage on Android. Now that they have Kotlin (which devs generally much prefer over the Java-facsimile Dart) and Jetpack, I'm not sure either what relevance Dart/Flutter has to Android.
The corporate arm of Google has some seriously strange Scientology style vibes about it and I think that is a big driver naturally in their approach to design.
If you go and read the material design docs for example, this isn’t my full time area of expertise but I don’t see anything controversial in there and there is no way in hell that they haven’t tested the hell out of it from every possible angle but the outcome is honestly kind of soulless.
My actual full time area of expertise is in running A/B tests and I’ll be the first to say that the link between “good aesthetics” and what actually works is much weaker than you might expect. See Amazon for another clear example.
> I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design.
While people selling design languages like to pretend that they are objective, design is largely aesthetics which is largely subjective. IMO, Google is consistently far better than Apple, which consistently, at least since the iPhone era, has come off visibly trying to hard (though recently less so than in the over-the-top skeumorphism period.)
Design isn't just aesthetics... Design is interaction, is taking care of how responsive this or that action can be, it's much more about HCI than on how things look like.
You are focusing too much on the visual aspects of design, you can't say that Google is consistently far better than Apple in overall design, you might prefer Google's aesthetics but design as a whole I can't really agree with you.
> You are focusing too much on the visual aspects of design
No, I’m not; aesthetic preferences are not limited to the visual, and preferences and relative importance of all the elements you identify are within the scope of subjective aesthetic preference. Though grandparent who I was responding to was focussed entirely on the visual—their whole criticism of Google design was: “...end up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great.”—so if I was focussed, even exclusively, on the visual aspects of design in my response it would have been appropriate in context.
The latest Chrome on MacOS has absolutely murdered the old Chrome desktop. There are now pointless circles around the quicklinks. You can customise the colours but you can't fully customise them, so the best you can get is a weird palette that doesn't look how you want it to look.
It's sort-of usable if you set up some custom wallpaper, but that takes a while to load, and while it's loading the page glitches with the original colour scheme on grey.
The experience was fine as it was. Now it's somewhere between irritating and infuriating.
I disagree; I believe Apple is a great—if not the best—example at the company-scale we speak of. Apple has goofed many times, but on the whole, their design philosophy has been both consistent and excellent. Apple typically gets certain new UI paradigms wrong, but doesn’t flub design on the whole: typography, spacing, white space, colors, animation, etc.
With all that said, it is difficult to speak purely objectively about design, so our opinions very well may differ completely reasonably. The best we can get are some large studies with statistical usability results, but, I admit, it’s easier to simply be handwavy. :)
Ive has gone, and there's been a notable uptick in the workability of product designs and (more subjectively) in visual coherence.
Ive did best under Jobs. There were numerous disasters when Jobs was no longer around to keep Ive on the rails, including iOS7, the butterfly keyboard, the touch bar, and the clunky first few iterations of Watch itself.
Big Sur is more Fisher-Price than it could be. Visually it's not a classic, but it's also better that mediocre.
But the new iMacs are probably the best iMacs ever, without the backward references and very visible Design™ of the post-Jobs Ive years.
Analyzing the contribution of particular individuals gives us no insight here. Sure, iOS7 definitely happened because Forstal was fired and Ive put in charge. But Ive didn't personally design any of iOS7, he was guiding others.
Apple just purely politically decided to reject everything they've done up to that point and bite more than they can chew, in precisely the same way Apple NEVER DOES, and other companies, like Microsoft with Vista or Windows 8 for example, often do.
This was very uncharacteristic for Apple, and yes the aftermath is still present to this day. We're at iOS15 almost, and they're still scraping bits of shit that hit the fan in iOS7.
i was on my phone and skimmed more than half the article before giving up and admitting it's actually unreadable and that i have no idea what great new thing they were trying to present.
I have always preferred the cleanness of android over thr imho weird ui design of iOS. I get that people loved the hardware esthetics of iPhones over android phones but not the software esthetics. At least nog since material design started. The weirdness of ios having to put blur on everything rather than just having one clean background color. The weird need to have everything be a rounded rectangle with gradient. And Id also give android the lead in whitespace use and a slight edge in font.
I don't have much experience with iOS products, but I recall early in smartphone history being flabbergasted by the lack of basic affordances like a notification bar, or quick settings (eg to switch wifi on/off). I'd imagine both UIs are vastly different now, so I don't think that these examples are directly relevant. But I heard so much in those days about how iOS's UI was vastly superior and was so shocked by my first introduction to it, that I remain baseline skeptical of claims that it's objectively better than Android. People just seem too blinded to realize that their personal preference isn't a universal measure of quality. (This paragraph is mostly in response to the fact that the GP comment is so downvoted for saying "I prefer Android's UI")
As far as picking practical examples, my lack of familiarity with iOS means some of these may be obsolete, but some obvious ones that come to mind:
1) Is iOS multitasking still as poor as it used to be? Eg, are split-screen apps on the iPhone still impossible?
2) Are homescreen widgets still impossible on iOS?
3) Are you still forced to open (eg) app links with lower-quality off-brand apps like Apple Maps, or can you set your preferred app the first time you open a link of a certain type?
I'm not even going very far afield here, as I'm only picking things that a) I know iOS had a feature gap in at some point and b) I would trip over at least weekly were my OS to have these issues. I'd imagine that one could do a little research and come up with more such examples (as well as examples where iOS's UI is superior to Android's).
1) yes. but I think it's better for it and obviously plenty of others do too including apple
2) no, home screen widgets in iOS have been a feature for a while now
3) no, iOS asks me if I want to open in Apple Maps or Google Maps.
I think you're conflating features and design. Whether or not there's a particular feature (turn of WIFI), is not an attribute of the design. So you can fairly say the iOS feature set was too minimal, but you can't attribute that to UI design
> yes. but I think it's better for it and obviously plenty of others do too including apple
This is unfalsifiable, and the line of thinking that generates it is trivially rebutted with a quick look at recent history. All of the limitations I mentioned were lauded as not-actually-useful by Apple (and their partisans) until they launched me-too version, at which point everyone immediately flipped to excitement.
The parent comment said the Android UI was better; I took that straightforwardly to mean the UI in general. He does mention "since Material", so I can see how you interpreted it as a reference to design.
That just makes the downvotes more ridiculous! There's no accounting for taste, and it's easy to imagine someone liking any design over another.
1. Yeah, still not great.
2. No, homescreen widgets now exist in iOS
3. Short answer is "kind of". There's official support for setting default web & email clients, but many (most?) apps support setting a preference for e.g. mapping providers.
All that being said, I think you're coming at things mostly from a feature angle which is perhaps a different discussion.
From a pure aesthetic consistency, polish, and end-to-end visual experience perspective Apple still does a better job than Google.
Whether or not that extra dash of visual polish makes up for feature deficiencies or ecosystem limitations is a broader question of course.
This paragraph is mostly in response to the fact that the GP comment is so downvoted for saying "I prefer Android's UI" - heh. This is not the first time i am saying in this forum. But before ice cream sandwich Android UI was plain ugly. I am not talking about UX or other features. But with Material design they have a better UI and even better UX as well. Apple was always known for it UI but that not mean you take that as a fact instead of evaluating it as time goes by.
You’d be surprised how many Android developers never got the difference between the back button and “up” action. I think this created so much confusion and inconsistencies.
Last time I was an Android user (and, for quite a while and for a couple different spans, an Android developer), that button was a ton of fun for when I wanted to see what random-ass crap the OS or application would decide to do when I pressed it. It was a "press only if you can't find something better to press" button given prime real-estate.
[EDIT] I think the fundamental problem with it is that, if an app screen deliberately presents a back button, there's nearly a 100% chance the current application will handle it in some way that makes sense for the current screen. With an always-on back button, the user has no way of knowing which of three handlers will receive it: 1) The OS, 2) The application, but not handling it in some way that makes sense for the current screen, or 3) The application, handling it sensibly for the current screen. You're rolling the dice.
Not original commenter, but some examples of Android's superior UI/UX:
- "Back" action is consistent and not in a different spot in each app.
- Notifications are more actionable, organized, and clear.
- Actions tend to be more clear and discoverable. On ios apps you need to try swiping, clicking, holding, and pinching seemingly random elements to "discover" basic actions. I forgot which app, but one of Apples literally starts you on some screens scrolled a little...and you have to guess you can scroll UP to find extra info and options.
- So many extra steps to do anything. E.g. you can turn on/off wifi in quick settings for both, but on Android you can get to your wifi settings by long pressing the quick settings button, but in ios you have to open and navigate through settings.
- Can't arrange app icons as flexibly or have widgets on home screen.
- ios notification panel has like 3 different modes all with different capabilities and purposes depending on how you open it.
- The app settings are ridiculous to navigate in ios. Sometimes they're in app, sometimes in the settings app's app settings pages, and iirc, sometimes in separate settings app pages altogether (e.g. I think permissions or accessibility settings per-app have a whole 'nother place to find them.
- Notification page search bar has really poor, irrelevant results that display above the web results you really want.
- Scrolling on ios is slower and more jittery than Android these days which surprises me.
- Apps look squished and busy with text with ios' UI. Not always clear what's a button, what's swipable, whether you're deeply nested in navigation or at the top, etc.
- ios seems to skip loading indicators and just show empty screens, which is really frustrating.
- Very subjective but ios emojis have a pseudo-realistic creepy vibe and icky feel to me.
Etc, etc, I have more but I'll stop there :-/ I love my MacBook and use ios for a few professional needs, but ios feels almost unusable in comparison as an everyday device to me.
> E.g. you can turn on/off wifi in quick settings for both, but on Android you can get to your wifi settings by long pressing the quick settings button, but in ios you have to open and navigate through settings.
This is false, you can do the same on iOS nowadays... Long press the WiFi icon from the tray (after expanding the WiFi/airplane mode/Bluetooth widget box) and you will get to the list of networks.
A bunch of other statements are also not completely true, such as the widgets on Home Screen (or are you talking about some specific type of widgeting feature that iOS doesn't have?).
> ios notification panel has like 3 different modes all with different capabilities and purposes depending on how you open it.
Can you show me this? Can't replicate that in any of my current iOS devices, not that notifications on iOS is good but this issue with Notification Centre has been fixed for a while.
> Scrolling on ios is slower and more jittery than Android these days which surprises me.
How did you measure this? I just went to try this out, scrolled through some browser pages and apps that have infinite scrolling my iPhone 12 Pro Max and my flatmate's OnePlus 9 Pro, no idea what you mean because the experience is, for me, very similar.
> Apps look squished and busy with text with ios' UI. Not always clear what's a button, what's swipable, whether you're deeply nested in navigation or at the top, etc.
This is due to you not using iOS perhaps, I have the same issue with Android after not using it at all for 6+ years, I don't understand the interface and what is interactive or not.
> ios seems to skip loading indicators and just show empty screens, which is really frustrating.
I don't experience this and it seems to be much more a critic of apps you've experienced it rather than iOS as an OS.
I am not an Apple fan, I just use their products because they suffice my use cases, but I feel you conflated some very different issues and subjective judgment stated as facts.
The general UI design is far simpler cleaner than iOS. iOS feels very dated. Notification dropdown is a big UI improvement. Navigation is better because of back button unlike the tiny back link in iOS. They did change the time picker which i had issues before because of the scroll picker(my hands are sweaty). These are wrt iPad, which i use mostly for testing iOS apps not a normal day to day use.
For better or for worse, being functional and having good (visual) design can often be measured distinctly. Ideally they go hand-in-hand (i.e., good visual design ought to positively serve functionality). Most of Android’s visual design, regardless of functional convenience and consistency, feels cobbled together by people who downloaded Inkscape. The typography, iconography, animation, etc. are, in my opinion, all off.
Its your opinion. As for me Android has a visual consistency which is not matched by iOS. As is said before iOS is dated. Though it has been dated fore few years. I still remember when i first got the iPad and saw the UI. I was like maybe i am on a older version. Nope latest version. Material design has been improving, need to see if this re-design is better than before.
My fellow developer did not know that you can long press on mac bottom bar like for years. He observed it when i did it. I think i even noticed it after many days. That's the problem with hidden gestures. Android the same issue when you hide the bottom bar. I just keep it on, swiping is anyway difficult when palms are sweaty.
Apple sells tangible goods. Google is a middleman selling online ad services. Apple's customers are consumers. Google's customers are advertisers. Do advertisers care about Google's choice of colors and shapes. Google only needs to be effective at one thing: selling online ad services.
Without advertising revenue the middleman is doomed. Not true for companies, like hardware vendors, that sell products (instead of giving them away as a means to enable more collection of data about users, who will be the targets of online ads).
My guess is they want to avoid any signals of dominance. It's not that they cannot afford to look stylish.
The question was probably "how modern or innovative do we want to look?" and the answer something like: "let's better lay low for the next years with all the public scrutiny and the risk of a breakup".
Microsoft has employed the same strategy for years, IMO.
Did I really just read several paragraphs of corporate marketing babble to discover that this is mostly about a universal wallpaper that carries over to your apps?? Also, the quote about form following feeling is basically ripped off from Apple/Jobs lore. Replace feeling with emotion and it’s almost a direct quote from the Isaacson biography.
It's a universal cross-app theming framework/guidance based on a customizable five-color palette... derived from a wallpaper that carries over to your apps ;)
IMO it's ambitious, perhaps excessively so. I work on a product that we white label and recolorize for various enterprise-scale clients who want adherence to their own color palettes, and there are often things that feel "off" when we change color palettes alone... simply because typography, whitespace, and color go hand in hand to create a brand identity. It's never as easy as swapping colors.
And then there's the underlying assumption that a user wants a single color identity to follow them across the aspects of their personal identity. I don't know about others, but I want my social apps to have a different "feel" from my corporate messaging and issue-tracking systems. As Bob Dylan puts it:
> "Red Cadillac and a black mustache... Pink petal-pushers, red blue jeans... I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods / I contain multitudes."
If Bob Dylan is implicitly criticizing your design framework's core assumptions in his latest studio album... you're by definition not Steve Jobs.
oh I see that understanding is not among your strengths lol, this blog it's not just about a global wallpaper cm'on. it's about a new way of design their components. the wallpaper thing was only the first point listed actually
Well, nothing new from google. But everybody does it so it must be good. I still wonder when they will learn about sorting.( alphabettcally sorted apps on my phone starts at t then d, then a then again t etc). But i presume it's much easier to discover that the wheel rolls than to build a carriage.
Seems like this will be an unpopular opinion, but I like the design.
How appealing a design is is personal preference, and I think a lot of the elements advertised, say, squiggly sliders, show the flexibility of the system; it's not like all sliders will be squiggly, but it opens up the possibility while still working with the rest of the design language.
The emphasis on customization is important as well - a more flexible system means that you can customize things that look more closely to how you want them, whether this be bright and squiggly, or dark and slick.
I suspect a nonzero amount of hate online is coming from iOS users, who've always seemed to prefer non-customizable, "curated" designs (e.g. historically being anti-widgets, anti-folders, anti-theming, etc) and not from actual Android users who tend to value customization and diverging from the "standard" interface.
Of course, some Android users are going to dislike the new design -- it is a design preference and it's _different_, after all!
I love the new design. There are a few rough edges (like the brightness bar!) but I assume it'll be polished over the multi-year roadmap they've given, or at least through each of the dev previews until the Pixel 6 drops.
I like it, but I still miss Holo way more. Peak Android for me was 4.2.2 Jelly Bean before they removed the Phablet UI layouts. I had the Nexus-7-style layouts on a Galaxy NoteⅡ and don't think any phone I've owned since then has topped it interface-wise.
> Seems like this will be an unpopular opinion, but I like the design.
There seems to be a huge amount of positive feedback, both from media and Android users, so it's not an unpopular opinion at all. It seems to mostly be unpopular opinion between existing iOS users :)
I'm also an android user and i never liked material too much. come to think of it never liked too much any of the previous android designs either. it's not that material is bad, is just bland and doesn't work for me. although i find the floating "+" circles positively horrible.
I'm with you on that. Customization is important to me (one of the main reasons I use Android), and I'm eager to see how this turns out. I really appreciated the custom styling options added to Google Now Launcher and this feels like the next step.
Here's the problem: "We built upon this insight to generate unique Material palettes for everyone, derived from a personal signal—wallpaper—that can be applied to their entire experience."
I like my wallpapers to be striking, geometric, interesting, but ultimately distinctive from the rest of my phone, where I do want colours.
So I hope there will be another way to generate signals for the phone colour pallette.
Yup. My home screen wallpaper is just black, because I find anything else distracting when I'm looking for an app. My lockscreen wallpaper is just some artwork I like, which has nothing to do with what I would like as a color palette for the rest of the OS. I hope there's a way to decouple this from the wallpaper and it's just an automatic default that can be changed...
I remember when material design first came out and I thought it was really intelligent, they had derived a way to design based on physical attributes of the real world; light, shadows, cards stacking like pieces of paper...
I thought they were really onto something but every few years they now just seem to change it to fit with the fashion, maybe I was too naivete.
I've started to wonder if it's even possible to develop a stable form of design that can last, stay up to date and be good looking.
Yeah, I originally bought Material Design hook line and sinker. A lot of assumptions that bled over from desktop needed addressing in a mobile touchscreen environment.
Today? Android UI changes are starting to feel more like fashion than design. A trend to change every year, constantly changing for the sake of change to keep the consumerism going. Not because it solves a new problem in a new way or it is better for people, but because they just need to stir the pot a little bit more because they're out of new ideas but still need to justify charging flagship phone money.
> “Isometric perspective is interesting, because nothing recedes to a vanishing point,” Rudnick says, “and therefore it also eliminates the variable of time.” He points out that this type of design is particularly popular with fintech and mortgage companies – playing down the passage of time is particularly advantageous to firms selling financial products that you may end up paying off for years.
What the fuck do vanishing points have to do with time?
For a mortgage company, you don't have a ton of flexibility with your rates— there's a little wiggle room but for the most part your rates will be correlated with the Federal Reserve's interest rates. However, you can control the distance, which lets you alter the logo's perception of time.
I actually just got into the beta for the GPT-3 API but I think OpenAI's TOS say that I'm only allowed to use the API for the purpose I mentioned in my beta application (writing computer assisted sasquatch erotica). So HN comments would violate their TOS, not to mention the other ethical quandaries.
The poster above had a question about the relationship between distance traveled and elapsed time. There's a simple mathematical relationship between the two- when your rate is fixed they're directly proportional. A distance that is 2x as far will take twice as long to traverse.
EDIT: To give a bit more context, in 3D geometry, isometric (and other orthographic projections) are just projections which do not apply a perspective divide. No time component anywhere.
Normal 3D perspective has a vanishing point, objects appear farther and farther in the Z axis. Distance is directly related to time in our heads. Isometric perspective eliminates that notion, objects at the back are the same size (and as “reachable”) as the ones in front.
I upvoted solely for the use of an en dash ( – ) in the title, instead of a hyphen ( - ).
Probably comes down to personal aesthetics, but I find it looks so much nicer!
For users on Windows, I recommend setting up an AutoHotKey script to convert the string "==-" to "–", and "===-" to "—".
Easy to type, very intuitive (typing more characters gives a longer-width dash), and gives your carefully crafted email missives a lingering, hard-to-describe dash of style!
Slightly harder to remember, but you can also press Alt+0150 for an en dash or Alt+0151 for an em dash. Works on any machine without any third-party software or configuration!
Yeah, afaik that's right. To my knowledge, the en dash is raised in some fonts compared to the other ones, so that it aligns better with numbers—which are usually always ‘uppercase’.
Windows also has some limited built-in Compose Key/Dead Key (AltGr) support, but it's baked into the Keyboard Layout and very Keyboard Layout specific with some layouts doing a better job than others and no easy ways to copy them to other layouts. (For instance, Colemak's layout on Windows provides a handful of common punctuation/symbols: https://colemak.com/Multilingual)
It’s interesting Google is focusing so heavily on “color” as a primary design element (redesigned Mail, Drive, Docs, etc., unique individualized color palettes(? if I understand that correctly)) when one of the most common tests for UI designs is the grayscale test. I mostly try to avoid senseless “update hate,” but I have accidentally opened the wrong Google App multiple times after the redesign and am constantly grateful for Apple’s “reduced motion/transparency” settings when I have headaches.
"The design system is built React first. We also support core parts of the system in vanilla JS, Angular, Vue, and Svelte. If you’re using a different framework, you can still build components by following our guidelines for other frameworks."
Every human brain has inherent, powerful functionality to read depth cues from 2D images to infer object separation, shape, and distance.
Flat design intentionally avoids including any of these depth cues that would take advantage of this functionality. It is one of the best examples of form over function I can think of.
I like this design but I wonder how many apps will actually adopt this. I don't see Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc rushing to adopt this (it largely conflicts with their own design language.)
Also a lot of smaller companies rarely update theming for apps so I don't see them doing it either (I doubt my banking app cares.) I have a feeling few apps will actually update to this leading to fragmentation. Anyways we will see.
Ah, yes, the cycle continues. Maybe with Android 15 they bring back shadows and with 20 there will be more colors and Material Design will look like Windows XP again and with Android 30 we are back at something that shows three shades of gray at most, with maybe only a solid colored button somewhere.
One of the things I dislike in some modern designs is auto-assigned random colors. On one hand, it's a bit easier to visually keep track of items, but it also looks rather crappy. I'm hoping that this might get a bit better in the future.
I wish instead if this they would have added an official "Desktop mode" for Android so that you can connect the phone to monitor/keyboard/mouse and use it like a desktop. Once this becomes part of the android base platform, we would not have to depend on other companies (like Dex from Samsung).
i find it hard to believe no one maintaining these 'material.io' pages doesn't notice the animated sticky header [0] popping in and out again and again and again as you scroll down the page.
From the look of your gif, it looks like you're just barely scrolling back up for a few pixels between scrolls and the navbar seems to pop up immediately after.
Scrolling up gets it to pop out for me, but I need to scroll up a lot more than you do in order to replicate this (scrolling down normally looks fine on Linux/Chrome). Sounds like it might be possible they haven't noticed it and would appreciate a bug report. :)
I don't see that bug on Firefox (version 88, linux amd64). It slides out as I scoll down and stays hidden when I stop scrolling. It only comes back into view when I scroll up.
edit: Are you scrolling with a janky mouse wheel or multi-touch trackpad that might be triggering up events accidentally? It looks like your page jerks up a teeny bit from momentum when you stop--that's probably the issue.
Well looks better than the previous iteration. Less abstract, more softer. I don't know why it has taken so long to shake off their overly theoretical approach for one that is based on what users perceive as nicer but I'm glad they are not paying their designers for nothing.
I doubt it very much that this customization will be implemented consistently and fully by developers, unless Google themselves solve everything for the programmer and require next to zero changes.
Ok this is a conspiracy theory, but I think the majority of designers would be out of work if it wasn’t for these endless redesigns that bring little value.
I find it funny that I went to the slider section and NONE of the images were actual sliders, even with "web" selected. At least Bootstrap let's you play with the controls on the actual page.
What a hodge podge of a mess of mid-90’s designer Kleenex-box kitsch. What the hell is going on inside Google lately, this is somehow even more offensive than their banned word list we just learned about the other day.
I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design. Apple can do it, which leads me to believe the ability to pull it off is largely cultural. Something or someone in Apple demands design that is relatable, good-looking, and consistent, and Google simply doesn’t have the same driving force.
Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.
(Edit: And to be clear, I mean Google’s design implementation in its entirety, especially beyond Android, including this very webpage which describes their new design.)