<story><title> Why do apps from the same company look worse on Android than on iPhone?</title><url>http://android-gripes.tumblr.com/post/4409289546/why-do-apps-from-the-same-company-look-worse-on-android</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>MichaelApproved</author><text>That doesn&apos;t excuse the apps that actually write an entire UI from scratch. As I mentioned before, the CNBC app is all custom UI, beautiful and mostly entirely self-contained. However, the android version is a POS thats essentially just a mobile webpage.&lt;p&gt;Built in OS UI is not a factor here. I suspect budget isn&apos;t either.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Here&apos;s the link to their Android app. The screen you see is basically the whole app. Click on anything and you&apos;re sent to their mobile web &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnbc.com/id/37130092/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cnbc.com/id/37130092/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here&apos;s the iPhone app &lt;a href=&quot;http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cnbc-real-time/id334125582?mt=8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cnbc-real-time/id334125582?mt...&lt;/a&gt; It&apos;s hard to believe the same company released both apps.&lt;p&gt;Even their official &quot;Apps&quot; page has little mention of the Android app &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnbc.com/id/33077961&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cnbc.com/id/33077961&lt;/a&gt; It&apos;s just a tiny link at the bottom that I didn&apos;t notice the first time.</text></item><item><author>flyosity</author><text>I think it&apos;s the standard that is set by the original creator of the UI widgets available on the platform, in this case, Apple vs. Google.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m an iPhone UI designer/developer and you can make a really nice looking app without doing any custom design work just by using the widgets that Apple provides. A good example of an app that was nearly all stock is Tweetie 1 for iPhone and it won an Apple Design Award. Apple has put an incredible amount of polish (single-pixel highlights and shadows, consistent sheen/gloss across elements, built-in animations for common interactions) into the widgets as part of UIKit, and then the apps that are included on the iPhone are also incredibly polished. This sets the bar very high and also gives a quality of UI design that developers can look up to and try to emulate.&lt;p&gt;The apps that Google built for Android (Maps in particular) are very clean and elegant but I would hesitate to call them beautiful or extremely polished. Google&apos;s design aesthetic typically eschews gradients, sheen, highlights and shadows in favor of a flatter, cleaner look and feel. Although Google&apos;s Android apps are well-designed, they don&apos;t look like a team of visual designers hand-crafted each and every corner like Apple&apos;s apps and UIKit widgets seem to be. Because of this cleaner, simpler aesthetic, the bar for &quot;good-looking&quot; on Android is a lot lower than for iPhone and it seems companies will cut corners on Android app UI design &amp;#38; visual polish because of it.&lt;p&gt;Another theory is that companies might feel that Android phone owners are more technical, more geeky, and thus &quot;don&apos;t need&quot; a really polished interface so they spend fewer resources on it. Once a few big companies release Android apps with a sub-par design, other companies see this and follow suit, continuing the trend forwards. Obviously this is a difficult stigma to get out of, but some companies are putting out great Android apps -- Gowalla comes to mind -- so there is hope.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wvenable</author><text>&amp;#62; Built in OS UI is not a factor here. I suspect budget isn&apos;t either.&lt;p&gt;The difference is possibly &lt;i&gt;talent&lt;/i&gt;.  They likely outsource the development to different companies; one who develops exclusively for the iPhone and the other for Android.  Different teams of developers producing vastly different results.  The iPhone ecosystem is more mature (and more picky) which could easily explain the differences.</text></comment>
<story><title> Why do apps from the same company look worse on Android than on iPhone?</title><url>http://android-gripes.tumblr.com/post/4409289546/why-do-apps-from-the-same-company-look-worse-on-android</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>MichaelApproved</author><text>That doesn&apos;t excuse the apps that actually write an entire UI from scratch. As I mentioned before, the CNBC app is all custom UI, beautiful and mostly entirely self-contained. However, the android version is a POS thats essentially just a mobile webpage.&lt;p&gt;Built in OS UI is not a factor here. I suspect budget isn&apos;t either.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Here&apos;s the link to their Android app. The screen you see is basically the whole app. Click on anything and you&apos;re sent to their mobile web &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnbc.com/id/37130092/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cnbc.com/id/37130092/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here&apos;s the iPhone app &lt;a href=&quot;http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cnbc-real-time/id334125582?mt=8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cnbc-real-time/id334125582?mt...&lt;/a&gt; It&apos;s hard to believe the same company released both apps.&lt;p&gt;Even their official &quot;Apps&quot; page has little mention of the Android app &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnbc.com/id/33077961&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.cnbc.com/id/33077961&lt;/a&gt; It&apos;s just a tiny link at the bottom that I didn&apos;t notice the first time.</text></item><item><author>flyosity</author><text>I think it&apos;s the standard that is set by the original creator of the UI widgets available on the platform, in this case, Apple vs. Google.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m an iPhone UI designer/developer and you can make a really nice looking app without doing any custom design work just by using the widgets that Apple provides. A good example of an app that was nearly all stock is Tweetie 1 for iPhone and it won an Apple Design Award. Apple has put an incredible amount of polish (single-pixel highlights and shadows, consistent sheen/gloss across elements, built-in animations for common interactions) into the widgets as part of UIKit, and then the apps that are included on the iPhone are also incredibly polished. This sets the bar very high and also gives a quality of UI design that developers can look up to and try to emulate.&lt;p&gt;The apps that Google built for Android (Maps in particular) are very clean and elegant but I would hesitate to call them beautiful or extremely polished. Google&apos;s design aesthetic typically eschews gradients, sheen, highlights and shadows in favor of a flatter, cleaner look and feel. Although Google&apos;s Android apps are well-designed, they don&apos;t look like a team of visual designers hand-crafted each and every corner like Apple&apos;s apps and UIKit widgets seem to be. Because of this cleaner, simpler aesthetic, the bar for &quot;good-looking&quot; on Android is a lot lower than for iPhone and it seems companies will cut corners on Android app UI design &amp;#38; visual polish because of it.&lt;p&gt;Another theory is that companies might feel that Android phone owners are more technical, more geeky, and thus &quot;don&apos;t need&quot; a really polished interface so they spend fewer resources on it. Once a few big companies release Android apps with a sub-par design, other companies see this and follow suit, continuing the trend forwards. Obviously this is a difficult stigma to get out of, but some companies are putting out great Android apps -- Gowalla comes to mind -- so there is hope.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>trythis</author><text>Actually, there are quite a lot of standard UIKit objects used in the iPhone version, so it definitely isn&apos;t written from scratch. Granted, it doesn&apos;t explain why the Android version makes such a poor showing, since I&apos;m pretty sure Android has equivalents for a lot of those elements.&lt;p&gt;There are, however, so many possible reasons why Android versions get the shaft that it&apos;s nearly impossible to say why any given pair of apps are so different in quality. It could be that it&apos;s easier to find iOS devs that really care about UX and polish (lots of self-selection going on here, similar to Mac/Windows third-party devs). It could be that a company asks their iOS dev to knock out an Android version, when they&apos;re not competent at developing for the platform. It could be that the folks in charge of getting mobile apps made for their company just like iPhones more (not a stretch, given demographic differences) or see them as more hip or marketable and funnel more money that way. Or, it could be that, after spending lavish amounts of money on the iPhone app and seeing it not set the world on fire, they scale back to merely &quot;establishing a presence&quot; on Android instead of making the same effort.&lt;p&gt;A lot of these behaviors wouldn&apos;t surprise me, particularly from companies whose primary business is not creating software.</text></comment>