[saturdaysaint]

Nice mock-ups, but I disagree with most of the premises here. As far as I can tell, iOS doesn't have much problem with people leaving due to some quibble with the UI's supposed lack of sophistication. I'm sure there are some exceptions among HN readers, but among the very few people in my circles on Android, all cite screen size as their main reason. Japan, a country that's been at the cutting edge of the mobile market for decades, is flocking to the iPhone now that it's available on the big carriers - not what you'd expect if there was widespread perception of iOS as "dumbed down".

The only thing I definitively agree with is that I hope Apple supports multiple profiles for iPad. As someone that uses both Android and iOS pretty regularly, I don't think widgets add much that the Notification shade and Action Center don't handle capably. I mostly hope that iOS 8 is invisible - add some APIs for Siri and hooks into home automation, improve performance.

[incision]

>'I'm sure there are some exceptions among HN readers, but among the very few people in my circles on Android, all cite screen size as their main reason.'

I do some work with an org that offers a choice among iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry for thousands of company phones.

I find that 'normal' people are barely aware of any difference between iOS and Android. They care about screen size as you note and really practical things like battery life and reception. The only time OS becomes relevant is when someone wants to switch and worries about losing stuff in the transition.

Personally, what locks me into Android is the keyboard. Having used Swype for years now means that I can't even consider iOS until it has an equivalent.

[petercooper]

all cite screen size as their main reason.

Just one data point, but it was "keyboard" by far for me. The iOS keyboard is horrible and very difficult to customize so I took a risk and switched at my last update (and FWIW, I'm finding Android streets ahead in terms of functionality). Digging the larger screen size is something that came later for me but would definitely be another reason not to go back for me now.

[cageface]

I agree. I really appreciate the richer inter-app sharing on Android but the absolute deal-breaker for me is the keyboard. Android keyboards like TouchPal or Swiftkey are so much more efficient and user friendly than the 2007-vintage iOS keyboard I just get irritated every time I have to use an iPhone for more than five minutes. And that's just for English. For other languages with a lot of accented characters it's not even a contest. I've been living in Vietnam for a few years now and people often mistake me for a native when SMSing because I write properly accented Vietnamese, which is easy with Swiftkey, whereas most locals write a crippled shorthand because typing all the accents on an iPhone is such a chore.

I think Apple's not used to having competition as agile as Google. Maybe their slow-and-steady approach was enough for them to power past Microsoft but much more rapid evolution on the hardware and software front is going to be necessary if they want to beat the entire Android ecosystem. Let's see what they come up with next week.

[nicholassmith]

People leaving for keyboard reasons are generally, and I hate the term, 'power users'. For 90% of the iOS customer base the keyboard works perfectly well, I'm not the biggest lover of it but I think it's reasonably solid for what it is and what it does.

[jkestner]

I really liked the Swype keyboard on my Galaxy S, but I got over it. With any of these keyboards, I still naturally delay anything longer than a status text/email/tweet for when I'm back at my computer, or even iPad (part of it's having enough screen to see the email I'm replying to, or the other sections I've written).

[jblow]

I don't think this is necessarily true. Yes, people leaving for keyboard-feature reasons are power users. But there are other keyboard reasons.

For example, iOS7 totally broke the keyboard so that fast touch-typists just can't type on it any more. This doesn't matter on something small like a phone, but on an iPad it is super-frustrating. Apple fixed it somewhat in recent updates but it's still broken in a few basic ways, all having to do with the fact that the person who programmed the new keyboard doesn't know how typing works.

It is confusing enough that a non-power-user probably doesn't have a clear idea why typing sucks now, they just know that letters don't come out with the right capitals any more, sometimes extra spaces show up, and damn that shift key is confusing. etc. It is not so much "Android is better" as it is "iOS is not a nice experience any more".

There are similar things to do with web browsing. Web browsing is supposed to be one of the few things these devices specialize in, but on my iPad Air it is terrible. If I go to a web site with images on it and scroll down, most of the images don't load for a LONG time, leaving me with mainly a blank page. When iOS7 came out the browser crashed all the damn time. Now that is mostly fixed but it still crashes sometimes.

Meanwhile there are all these timing-based gestures that are thrown off by browser performance problems, leading to bad user experiences. For example, I want to scroll down a page, so I press on the screen, drag, and release. Well oops, some piece of JavaScript ran right then or something, causing the browser's timing to get confused (maybe it counts frames and only a couple of frames went by), so instead of a drag it interprets this as a tap, which for some reason causes me to select some garbage on the page that I don't care about. Well now I am in select mode and things get only more confusing from there (especially if more performance hitches are happening). This happens all the time.

When you can't even scroll down a web page reliably, and yet that is one of the main use cases you are selling your product for, you can't claim it is a luxury product. You aren't delivering a luxury experience so you can't charge a premium.

Apple has gotten away with this in the past, in similar situations, though, because of newness and shininess. As Marc Andreesen pointed out recently, for the first few years you could barely even make a call on an iPhone, and when you did it was super-frustrating. But still it caught on. I think this is just because it was so new and exciting and there weren't real competitors yet. Once the bloom is off that rose, in order to be perceived as a premium brand, you have to actually deliver quality. But Apple is not delivering quality with the OS, they are just delivering some kind of skin-deep attempt of an appearance of quality.

I consider iOS7 to be a huge misstep and a giant missed opportunity, much bigger even than Siri or Maps. I am not sure if fixing iOS7 would solve all Apple's problems, but it is where I would start.

However, I don't think the thesis of this article -- lack of UI features -- would be my first step. Because I don't agree with the article that iOS 7 is simple. In reality it's a mess, it just tries to appear simple. So the first step is making it really, actually simple, and make it deliver a solid, quality experience. Then you can think about adding UI features, which I would claim people don't care about as much.

[nicholassmith]

This is pretty heavily anecdotal but my parents (late 50s) haven't had any issues with the iOS 7 keyboard. As they say, it Just Works. I think it's heavily dependent on user expectations.

[saturdaysaint]

Different strokes, I guess - I dread using my work Android phone's keyboard (or any of the 3rd party ones I've tried) whereas iOS's hit detection/autocorrection mostly feels like an extension of my brain/fingers.

[dragonwriter]

As someone who switched recently, I find both the Samsung Keyboard on the Note 3 and the Google keyboard are light years ahead of the iOS keyboard even before considering the ability to use handwriting recognition in place of typing.

[saturdaysaint]

Like I said, though, "different strokes" ;) I've used an Android Phone with Google Keyboard and Swype as my daily driver for months at a time this year and was insanely relieved to use the iOS keyboard again. I found its predictions and the accuracy of the keyboard itself far more accurate, and the screen responsiveness in another league...

[sosborn]

The day I find a device with handwriting recognition that works with my chicken scratch I will jump for joy.

[aeturnum]

I have no anecdotal experience as to why people do or don't switch, but I think we should keep in mind that people often have difficult understanding and articulating why they like one product over another. Especially if they're unfamiliar with the formal language domain experts use.

To speculate, what could we get from "screen size?" Maybe they mean number of icons / elements on screen. Maybe they mean larger media viewing. Maybe they mean ease of physical manipulation. Maybe they mean a different DPI point. There are lots of factors that screen size affect, some of them would apply to any device with a larger screen, some of them apply to qualities that differ across mobile operating systems (iOS' handling of resolution, for instance).

[jobu]

The blocks are a neat idea, and possibly not far-fetched. Apple already has at least one "live" icon - the clock app tells the correct time down to the second.

My personal wish list:

  - customizable url scheme handlers (e.g. set Google Maps the default map app)
  - API for communication between apps
  - API for Siri
  - API for live icons
  - User profiles for iPad
  - Fingerprint reader for iPad (this plus profiles would be awesome!)
  - Biometric API - fingerprint and/or facial features
  - split-screen multitasking