There have been lots of blog posts, articles in the news and discussions on why apps look so much better on iOS than they do on Android. The problem with these articles is that they go straight to the software and blame it, they simply say “because iOS is better”, I believe this is not the case. Android is not the problem, Android developers are the cause, they think just because it is easy to publish on the Play Store and make money they don’t have to care about how their apps look. They simply throw on some shitty design they do in about an hour or two and say that’s fine, let’s make my self rich.
There are many apps which look amazing, and the commonality between these apps is that they follow the Android Design Guidelines. Below are screenshots[1] just some of my favourite good designed apps from Android (TED, Foursquare and FlightTrack) : The above screenshots show just how good looking the apps can be, if the developers just took some timeout and focused on designing it, and as you can see they follow the guidelines set by Google.
I just want Google to start looking at how many ugly apps there are in their Play Store and start enforcing developers to follow their guidelines and design better looks apps.
I am aware that Apple makes it easier to design good looking apps because of their Xcode and that for Android it is more time consuming (due to fragmentation) and is a big harder but in this century it is all about how good looking things are, if it looks crap then chances are you will be missing out on many sales/downloads.
I also want developers to focus their apps for Android OS 2.3+, and also the recent study on fragmentation of Android shows that HTC and Samsung are the winners and “Testing on the most popular Samsung & HTC devices will get you a long way”[2].
Just as a side note, I wish developers would stop just porting their iOS designed app to Android, that is not how it is supposed to be done. They are two different OS with many differences. One of the culprits is Instagram, they have 99% copied their iOS design to Android. If they followed the guidelines and designed for Android from ground up this is how good it can look[3]: So Android developers, go forth and focus on design as much are you are focusing on the code.
The screenshots are taken from Android niceties blog, this blog highlights the best looking Android apps and worth browsing for inspiration.
OpenSignalMaps done a study on the fragmentation of the Android market back in May.
This was designed by snalty and posted on The Verge forums showing how it would have looked like if they followed the Android design principles.