[TheAceOfHearts]

I hate it for web apps. Material design is designed primarily for simpler interfaces with a small screen and imprecise inputs, yet I use most web apps from my desktop or laptop where I have a large screen and very precise input methods. You cannot consolidate the two.

I'm not a fan of material design for mobile applications either. I find the animations obnoxious and annoying. It has also been my experience that mobile applications tend to have incredibly low information density and they require jumping through tons of hoops to perform even simple tasks. If I have the choice of installing a mobile app or using its website I always use the website.

[snaky]

Exactly.

By the way, we used to have a very precise input method on mobile - the stylus. In the times of Windows Mobile (original Windows Mobile, not renamed Windows Phone) with resisitive screens. The information density of those 240x320 3" screens is hard to achieve even today - google 'SPB Diary' for examples. Combined with stylus, multi-level menus and physical QWERTY keyboards (with shortcuts!) that were the very efficient machines actually.

Maybe recent revival of stylus, thanks to iPad Pro will tend to abandon the 'huge control elements' UI paradigm.

Samsung with their S-Pen on Note models would have a really value-adding and interesting stylus-oriented UI (as an option) instead of awful TouchWiz for years, but they never did it.

[jrs95]

Web apps need to be usable on mobile devices as well. So you can't use a design that is built with the assumption of precise mouse input without having a separate one for mobile. You can totally consolidate the two though, you're just making a trade off. The desktop interface won't be quite as good, but you have less work to do to support different devices.