[blinkingled]

[Unreasonable expectations and little knowledge or inclination to try things out] Please don't read the previous bracketed sentence as snarky or insulting - it reflects the fact that he bought an unlocked phone and expected it to work great out of box with T-Mobile (including WiFi calling!) and he wasn't inclined to search the Play Store for TMobile Voicemail - so there is definitely substance to that sentence. But I merely wanted to point out that he is a user who is perfect fit for iOS/iPhone design goals. And not all people fall into that bucket. And neither should simplicity at all costs be a universal design goal for every product. Obviously if he is inflexibly tuned to the iOS way of doing things it's no wonder he's going to have issues with anything else.

1) Two Apps / Choosing Apps - This is why many people prefer Android over iOS. If you are bugged by it - select the one you like and choose "Always" the next time. Done. (If you are a UI designer at least shed some light on what is the way to do a better UX on this feature - simply saying you don't know which one to pick is not really adding any value. You have to try Hangouts, Gallery, Photos and then choose them as "Always" - that's the idea and I find it as intuitive as it can be.)

2) Hardware differentiation - yeah just install a launcher once and be done with it - oh you will have to choose the default once after you install it, but yeah after that it's even easier. Oh and Google autocompletes HTC disable blinkfeed - first result tells you how in two steps.

3) Fine print of an unlocked Android phone - he is troubled because WiFi calling isn't available on _all_ Android phones whether or not the carrier is T-Mobile - and if it was there he would be sure to complain about what's that WiFi calling thing that I don't understand on my Verizon HTC One. Hardly a UI problem and since it requires special firmware support it's hardly fair to have everyone put it in.

4) Unlocking - it's a HTC thing. Stock Android and even Samsung phones just swipe and unlock - plus you can thank slide to unlock patent for some of the differentiation there.

5) Back button - as much as inconsistent it is, having it still beats not having it altogether. But yes it can be a little annoying at times.

6) Navigation bar - he complains about there being differences in Samsung and HTC phones! I can't figure out why that is relevant as his target audience generally will stick to one phone.

7) He even complains about the Notification bar! (For crying out loud everyone pretty much copies this from Android - including iOS!) "I clear my notifications periodically, but inevitably a pile of tiny incomprehensible turds appear at the top of my screen, uglifying it to no end." Ugh, what? Does iOS magically know which ones you like and shows only those?

8) Copy/Paste - this is one point I agree with him on. It just isn't as elegant as iOS and neither is it consistent.

But I stopped reading past that - too much personal preference stuff rather than valid points and being on a "User Experience Designer"'s blog I thought there would be insights on doing this right - I only saw "iOS is right" in some places.

[MBCook]

Insulting iOS users is not a productive way to start a discussion.

1) It's fair to let people choose a different app (I know many people really want this on iOS), but I think his complaint is valid. There are many situations where it's completely unclear to a new user why they should use app X over Y for photo management/SMS/etc. To ask them before they've even used the app the first time nearly ensures they're not ready to make that decision. Sensible defaults and perhaps delaying the prompting until the device notices the user uses an alternate app a couple of times may be a better way to handle this.

3) Why should it matter if my HTC One came from a T-Mobile store or not? The fact that they behave differently (and especially that T-Mobile's support isn't prepared for that) is clearly an issue. I think the voicemail note is telling. How many people, upon buying a new phone, would think "I need to go download a special app to get my voicemail working"?

4) HTC took something that worked fine and made it more confusing. That's clearly a design mistake.

5) If something doesn't work reliably, that's a design issue. Especially if it used to work.

> But I stopped reading past that [...] I only saw "iOS is right" in some places.

That's not what I saw. Rorschach test for your preference for Android/iOS perhaps?

[blinkingled]

Insulting iOS users? Where do you get that from? Users are users - they have preferences. Some prefer simple and not having to think and some prefer tweaking, suprises and flexibility. If I had said "stupid" iOS users then it would be an insult.

1) No his complaint isn't valid. There are sensible defaults - it only becomes a choice if you install another app that does the same things. In this case Gallery is built in and Google Photos is well Google's. It's not as if every app has a choice on launch. And how exactly are you going to solve the problem of user not having tried one or the other if the user isn't willing to choose one? Throw him a training video for both apps? That sounds even worse.

3) The whole idea of Android is different things for different people. You don't go buy an $699 unlocked phone and use it as a Specifically Optimized for Carrier X phone. It is an unlocked phone designed to run on many carriers as possible. If you need to download an app or two for further customization that's not really a big problem. If it is, then you should've bought something from T-Mobile store that they've customized for you. Wanting it both ways while pretending to be a simpleton user doesn't warrant any discussion.

4) If you need a certain type of lock screen and aren't willing to install one - you should at least look at the phones in a retail store and pick the one with the right lock screen - you can find a lot I bet. Complaining about HTC having confusing lock screen is contradictory to entire point of how Android works.

5) Yeah, sure - but at least it works. What other better options do you have - not having it? That's a worse solution. But yes, Google can do some tightening up on both Copy/Paste and Back button.

> That's not what I saw

So you saw him giving a solution or two that is not "do it iOS way - including don't have a back button"?

[aaronem]

> Unreasonable expectations and little knowledge or inclination to try things out - sounds like perfect iOS user to me

This you don't recognize as an insult? I'll bet you're a constant delight to your acquaintances.

[blinkingled]

I replied to a similar comment above. I sincerely wasn't insulting him. I was just pointing out that iOS/iPhone is a perfect choice for people who don't like to be bothered with these type of things. I might just change the wording given how many found it offensive.

[hillel]

My issue is not that I abhor choice. Choice is fine and sometimes good. My issue was that I was confronted with these choices out of the box. And the impetus for this was Google's business choices at the expense of a seamless user experience.

[ssmoot]

> You don't go buy an $699 unlocked phone and use it as a Specifically Optimized for Carrier X phone.

The point is you don't need to with an iPhone. I bought my 5C used and unlocked. No problems hopping onto AT&T with it. It's not "optimized" because it shouldn't be. The carrier is just "a series of tubes". I don't want to buy an AIO, TMobile or AT&T phone. I bought a MotoX because I wanted a MotoX.

[blinkingled]

You are constantly asserting that it didn't work - I am telling you voice mail just works on any GSM Android unlocked phone on most carriers in the US. You keep conflating VoiceMail not working with VoiceMail not working visually through the app, like iOS has done since day 1. It clearly is not the case - again VME just works in the way most GSM users use it. "Visual" voicemail doesn't work until you download an carrier specific app if your phone is not carrier branded.

[ssmoot]

I mentioned it one time. I guess that's some sort of definition of "constantly". ;-)

I'm not confusing anything though. I just have an expectation that I won't be dialing into some arcane menu system to retrieve just the messages I want. I haven't done so for almost 7 years. I don't pay too much attention to other's habits, but I haven't noticed anyone else do that for almost as long.

Visual Voicemail is the only voicemail I'd bother with. I'd guess that's pretty typical these days. I've even gone months after switching carriers having not even called the carrier to get voicemail set up because who leaves voicemails anyways but telemarketers?

Maybe it's different outside the US or in developing markets with a lot of feature-phones. I wouldn't know. This is just my own experience in DFW.

[skunkworks]

> Unreasonable expectations and little knowledge or inclination to try things out - sounds like perfect iOS user to me

Don't play dumb.

[blinkingled]

Unreasonable expectations - Buying an unlocked, generic, carrier unspecific phone and expecting it to work great out of box on T-Mobile. Little knowledge or inclination - not sure which one, but of course he had either little knowledge not to buy unlocked phone OR little inclination to find out that TMobile Voicemail app in Play store. What's wrong about what I said? And people can be that way - I am hardly insulting him for it - just saying not an user that'd do well under the given circumstances.

[hillel]

Voicemail shouldn't be a carrier specific experience. Is there something so differentiated about the t-mobile voicemail experience vs. the verizon voice mail experience? Shouldn't there just bean android voice mail experience that the carrier can direct at their back end as appropriate?

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a core feature (like voice mail) should work out of the box with no additional installations on my part.

[blinkingled]

The author implies he wanted an app to get his Voicemail like iOS. Nowhere does he say VoiceMail didn't work. The regular voicemail stuff just works on any stock Android GSM phone - you get a notification for new ones and you can tap that or long press 1 to go to carrier voice mail box for your old VMEs. I have that working on 5 different unlocked phones at the least on 3 different carriers. If you want an app - yeah you gotta find it in app store if your phone wasn't a carrier branded version - the app needs to do carrier specific things to get your voice messages and present you a list.

[mfish]

How is it unreasonable to buy a phone and expect it to work? Anything less than that is either the carrier screwing up a phone that works fine or HTC screwing up by not having a phone that works without the carrier's help. It is bad user experience, which is what his post is all about

[blinkingled]

It worked - I have always used unlocked phones and you do get voicemail notifications without doing anything further. (There are still possibilities of issues if you bought European model it won't have US Carrier's APN Settings etc. but that's hardly reasonable to expect.) He wanted T-Mobile VoiceMail app to be bundled with it and also WiFi calling - both are carrier specific features which would have worked fine if he would have bought the right phone -T-Mobile HTC One. Expecting that to work on an unlocked, carrier unspecific phone designed to be LCD on as many GSM carriers is nothing but unreasonable.

[mfish]

>He wanted T-Mobile VoiceMail app to be bundled

no, he wanted voicemail. T-Mobile decided to require a different app.

[blinkingled]

> It took me forever to realize that I had to download the T-Mobile voicemail app to get my voicemail

That's all he says. Nowhere in the post he says voicemail didn't work - he implies he wanted an app to get his Voicemail like iOS. The regular voicemail stuff just works on any stock Android GSM phone - you get a notification for new ones and you can tap that or long press 1 to go to carrier voice mail box for your old VMEs.

[ssmoot]

4. The MotoX lock screen sometimes unlocked with a swipe of a dot, and sometimes up from the bottom depending on wether there was an unaddressed notification. Incredibly annoying. You can unlock an iPhone 100% of the time blindly while pulling it out of your pocket. Not so Android.

5. No, it doesn't really. Because on iOS the convention is top-left. If it's not there, then you don't have that functionality in that app/area (obvious right?). On Android? Who knows what it does before you try it within a given app? Is it going to go "back"? Is it going to goto another app? The home screen? No idea.

7. iOS notifications are just better. I unpacked my MotoX. After following the first couple tasks in the Notifications list I wondered what that weird misaligned stack icon did. So I hit it. No more task list! Whatever Motorolla wanted me to see there and follow up on was just gone for good with no way to retrieve it. The universally praised "Active Notifications" on the MotoX? Never could figure out what's so "Active" about them. They don't seem to do anything iOS doesn't do except limit you to taking action on only the latest one (that's bad), and changing up how you unlock the phone (that's 0 for 2 bad).

I'll toss another one out there: The 90's called and they want their SMS App back. ;-)

I go back and forth between iOS and Android. Had a Nexus One. It was stolen. Got a 4S. Traded in an iPhone 5 for the MotoX. Traded in the MotoX for a 5C. This time I've kept my 5C and ordered a Sony Z Ultra GPE.

There's some neat things about Android for sure. But it's hard to believe there's people out there who are frequent users of both and think a superior UX is one of those things.

edit: Side note: I'm not sure I've ever seen such a down-vote brigade in effect on HN before. No replies, just down votes? If that doesn't scream fan-boy brigade I don't know what does...

[youngtaff]

> There's some neat things about Android for sure. But it's hard to believe there's people out there who are frequent users of both and think a superior UX is one of those things.

I've got a Nexus 4, iPhone 4S, iPad and a few others beside and I'd argue for me that Android does have superior UX.

There's no way I could use the 4S as my daily phone, and I've put off getting a new tablet until there's a decent 8" Android one out.

Sure iOS has plenty of polished apps but the integration between them is at Apple's whim - to share a webpage from Safari to GetPocket, I have to rely on bookmarklets FFS.

iOSs keyboard is another deal breaker for me, after using Swype hunt and peck for typing on a touch screen is horrible and then there's trying to make sense as to whether shift is on or not!

[ssmoot]

I wouldn't call the iOS keyboard "hunt and peck". You only need the visual for alignment. Otherwise your touch-typing skills seem to transfer pretty well. I mean, I don't have to wonder where the T key is before my thumb is moving towards it.

Calling the lack of Swype a deal-break seems perfectly reasonable to me though. To each their own. I saw my typing speed go through the floor on the MotoX, but that was due to two issues mostly:

1. Different key spacing. Which is entirely justified. I'm just not used to what I'm not used to. I imagine I'd have a similar frustrating re-training curve on the iPhone 6.

2. The lack of an easy apostrophe. You can tweak the stock keyboard a little bit, but mostly this one was nearly unforgivable to me. I try to get punctuation right and it drives me crazy that the stock Android keyboard seemed to be working against me there. Some alternative keyboards looked a little better, but they were almost universally tacky IMO and could've seriously used a few hours from an actual designer.

As a developer whose experience with designers is generally pretty frustrating (XHTML or Go Home! ... a few years later ... CSS for mobile first, and Desktop with media-queries, who cares if it breaks IE8 for no reason and has 0 advantages? It's Mobile-First to an extreme and you're a joke if you don't put the latest fad ahead of maintenance/functionality!) that almost hurts to say. ;-)

I haven't been able to make "Swyping" a habit. I've got no muscle memory for it. But almost everyone else I've met that's tried it loves it so I'm sure that's just me.

I'd be curious what parts of Android's UX you consider superior though. I could understand not wanting to make the 4S your daily phone just because of the screen size if nothing else. Plus iOS7 is pretty (IMO), but generally a step back in actual UX IMO with all the lagging issues (which seem to have improved a lot, but still occasionally annoying).

On the other hand the 4S's battery will be going well into the next day while the Nexus 4 would be on at least it's second charging cycle IME. The line where hardware issues qualify as UX is a bit fuzzy though I suppose.

I don't know what GetPocket is. But generally you can just hit the share/arrow button and copy if you're just interested in an address. I've found that to be a really comfortable workflow personally. I'm always pasting URLs, Images, etc into Hipchat.

Anyways, thanks for the respectful disagreement/comments. Certainly refreshing. Hopefully my end of the conversation holds up as well.

[fleitz]

Just keep in mind that the people who are downvoting you are the people who have been proclaiming the year of the linux desktop since 1998.

You're never going to convince them that the cut and paste mechanism in X is borderline mental, it's awesome cuz it's open and you could fix it if you wanted to, but it's now 2014 and no one has, but we have 8 more broken ways to do it since 1998.

[smrtinsert]

He completely missed the entire point of Intents which isn't surprising since he's not experienced in Android (better said, he's just an iOS guy).

[MBCook]

I don't think he did, I think he was commenting on the UI implementation.

Just because you think the interface to something isn't designed well doesn't mean the underlying feature is worthless.

[smrtinsert]

> because I don’t really know the difference between my choices. I have no real idea what the tradeoffs are in picking one app over the other. nd if the difference is so negligible, why do they even offer both.

It's clear he's referring to the apps themselves, and he views the choice iteself as intrinsically worthless. So yeah, he completely missed the point.

[MBCook]

Shipping a phone with two photo management apps just seems like a mistake to me in the first place.

I thought he was arguing a consequence of that (and the interface) and not the intrinsic value of Intents, but that may be my reading.

[hillel]

@MBCook you are correct. I have no problem with being able to make a choice. I have a problem having to make that choice out of the box between two pieces of software shipped by the same company. It's like they couldn't be bothered to settle it so they just punted the decision to me.

[ssmoot]

"the point" is that it's not explained what the consequences are.

If I choose Photos to view images in Messaging, it's not made clear that only Gallery is an option to attach images. If it were, why would anyone choose Photos unless Gallery were somehow flawed? And even if it were, why should you have to use two different apps for each side of what to a user is basically the same operation?