| "I think you are misreading what the "writing on the wall" is..." iOS is still the winning team at the moment, not Android, in terms of total devices out in the wild and more importantly to developers, app sales. I wonder how much more money the App Store has made since, say, January 1st, 2010 than the Android Marketplace... "I would not at all debate that the overall app ecosystem on the iPhone is superior to Android, largely owing to its early lead, yet the gap is rapidly narrowing. Very rapidly." Is it? The gap in total number of apps might be narrowing, but I don't see the quality gap getting any closer. As to "Dropzone" (I assume you mean Dropbox?) allowing local saving, yes, it does. But it saves the files to the SD card, and opening the same file in Dropbox isn't any faster than downloading it for the first time. On the iPhone, after the initial download, the file opens noticeably faster. You can call the Android Twitter client whatever you'd like, but the UI is not (in my opinion) nearly on the same level as Twitter or Twitterrific or numerous other iOS twitter apps, and scrolling is still janky as ever (much like scrolling in the rest of Android). RealCalc is fine, and spinner or not is a personal preference. But show me an app for Android that has the kind of attention to detail as described here: http://tapbots.com/blog/design/designing-convertbot Mail in Android 2.2 is not superb, and not as responsive as Mail for iOS. Plus, the UI for Mail in Android makes my eyes burn. Gmail for Android is wonderful, but I find Mail for iOS just as good for use with Gmail. Yes, there are hundreds of note taking apps for Android, but most are ugly and don't sync. Plus I'm not a big fan of the apps that do sync (AK Notepad and 3Banana), as I don't like the style of note taking encouraged by snaptic.com. The calendar app for Android is alright, but it misses the little things. In Calendar for iOS, when I move to say February 2011 and go to create a new event, it intelligently knows that the date of the new event is likely in February 2011. Try this in Android's calendar app... 2.2 is nice, but it's very telling that most people immediately go and download LauncherPro to replace the jerky scrolling found in the default launcher. And 2.2 still doesn't reach the level of responsiveness found in iOS4 while using the iPhone 4. And yes, games on Android are pathetic, nothing more to say on that front. It may sound like I hate Android, but I actually think it's pretty decent. I did enjoy my time with the Nexus One. But it reminds me heavily of the differences between Windows and OS X; Windows is functional but not enjoyable, OS X is both. |
Most is quite an exaggeration.
>But it reminds me heavily of the differences between Windows and OS X; Windows is functional but not enjoyable, OS X is both.
Windows 7 is thoroughly enjoyable. I'm hardly a Microsoft booster.
It's interesting that several of the apps you mentioned, highlighting the strength of the iOS platform, to me demonstrate the weakness of it: They're chrome and gloss and not much more. If I want a conversion app, the last thing I want is a giant graphical wheel, but that seems to be the way many iOS, and OSX for that matter, apps go: Take some trivial, trivial task and provide a minimal solution, but coating it with just enough chrome that people will call it "polish", while they hoard the spit-and-rub apps that they'll never actually use.
I pray that that sort of interface hubris never migrates to Android, and if it leaves some people complaining about the lack of supposed polish, so be it.