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by jwells89 876 days ago
For me a big part of it is how gestures track, the curves used by animations, inertia, bounciness, etc. Under iOS it all feels refined and naturalistic, whereas Android’s counterparts land somewhere in the uncanny valley and come off as more mechanical (fitting given its name, I suppose).

Aside from that, in general you can feel more “seams” between components and rough edges all throughout Android’s UX. It reminds me of how the Linux desktop experience used to be several years ago actually, except Android seems to have gotten stuck for unknown reasons where Linux DEs have continually improved.
1 comments
__MatrixMan__ 876 days ago
> you can feel more “seams” between components

That's it. I've been struggling to figure out what I can't stand about iOS and it just clicked. It's the lack of seams. When something breaks I can never figure out what specifically broke, so I can't reason about my mistake (or know who to contact if it's not my mistake).

I like seams so much that I'm running google play services in a sandbox (Graphene OS) so google has to grovel for my permission like everybody else whenever they want to do something. It's a little annoying, but it's teaching me where the seams are.

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jwells89 876 days ago
It all depends on what one’s looking for I guess. As an aesthetically inclined technical person, seams can be annoying to the point of distraction if they’re not thoughtfully worked into the design (90% of the time, they’re not).
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__MatrixMan__ 876 days ago
Different strokes for different folks I guess. I don't care about aesthetics at all, I'm just wanting to know where I'd put the crowbar if I wanted to turn it into something else.

The ideal technology for me is quietly doing is job somewhere I can't currently see and rarely have to look. Perhaps that counts as aesthetics?

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