[luke_s]

I think that material is great design, but terrible strategy and in the end may land up resulting in the Android design space being worse, not better.

For years google (and many members of the design community) made a very successful argument that android apps should look and act like android apps, and iOS apps should look and act like iOS apps and web apps should act like web apps. Trying to achieve design consistency across platforms was going to annoy your users. Instead you should strive for _branding_ consistency across platforms and use native interaction patterns.

A significant problem for Android has been iOS designs just copied over without adapting to the platform. The apps look and feel weird. As a user I find them confusing and frustrating to use. However progress was being made and people were starting to understand that if you want to build for Android you are going to need to design for Android.

Material throws that out the window. It says it right there in the goals[1]: "Develop a single underlying system that allows for a unified experience across platforms and device sizes."

IF we take it as given that our apps should look the same on all platforms, then why choose Material? Because I know my customers are going to say: "We have this great iOS design sitting right here, that we have already paid to have built. Lets use that! Besides we don't want to re-code our iOS app to suit Android". Or, they will come up with their own cross platform design to "differentiate themselves" and stand out.

[1] - http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introducti...

[nostrademons]

I think the idea is that there are ready-made toolkits for Material that will give you the same design across iOS, Android, and web, and so if it's easy to develop in, why not use them? As a startup founder, I have to say it makes a lot of sense. My core competency is finding & serving my own market, I don't have time to wrestle with designing for 3 platforms.

I'm guessing that the strategic advantage is to cut off Apple's knees. Apple's key differentiator has been design; this filters down into all the apps written for their platform, so that consumers say they choose iOS "because the apps are better-designed". Google wants a critical mass of iOS & web developers to choose Material instead, and make the Material design good enough that users won't prefer native iOS apps over Material apps. Then iOS becomes a fragmented mess of native, Material, and Cordova/PhoneGap apps, while Android is all unified Material design down to the OS, and mobile websites just look like Android.

IMHO it's brilliant strategically, though it's kinda dick-ish toward Apple. There are a couple huge unknowns though, like whether startup founders will adapt Material, whether those that do become large mobile successes, and whether Apple will even allow Material apps into the app store (they've been known to ban PhoneGap apps before for not following native look & feel guidelines).

[MisterBastahrd]

I've got a couple of personal projects I've been in the planning stages for, and I decided that it was worth my time to get familiar with Material. I don't think it's too much trouble to have applications behave in consistent ways. One of the things that drives me nuts in the desktop app space is when I hit the 'x' to close a window, and instead it minimizes an application to the system tray. I was going to take the weekend off of designing and planning, but instead I'm going to be neck deep in layouts. :)

[luke_s]

Yikes! Its embrace/extend/extinguish applied to design, and we just hit extend :-)

Frankly though, I can't see any of your huge unknowns ever coming to pass. Almost all startup founders and designers I know use iPhones. Many still have trouble understanding why they should pay attention to Android design at all. If material ever does start to pick up momentum on iOS I can see Apple wielding the ban hammer liberally. Everything they have done in the past shows they are not shy about removing apps they feel aren't in Apple's best interests.

[jamesaguilar]

There is no way google, or anyone, could accomplish the extinguish phase of an eee operation against design.

[luke_s]

Ah - I think perhaps what I meant wasn't clear. Its not against design - its against Apple. The medium the attack is conducted in is design.

Also, because this is the internet and tone doesn't come through very well, my comment is meant to be a bit tongue in cheek. I think the idea that google wants to conduct eee against Apple using design is just a little too far fetched, though there may be a tiny grain of truth in there somewhere.

[AJ007]

Presumably the end purpose of design is differentiation. Whatever Google is trying to do, Google has borrowed heavily on flat UIs other designers have been producing for some time. Rather than leading the pack, 'Material' is getting all of the stragglers to catch up. If all cars looked like Ferraris, Ferrari would change.

[blub]

Unless Google ports their UI framework to iOS, I don't see how iOS developers will use Material.

[nostrademons]

I thought that part of the I/O announcement was a toolkit/SDK for iOS that incorporated the Material design? I could be wrong, I just recall reading it in a HN comment and can't find mentions on the web now, but it's the logical way to get the look & feel onto iOS.

[tesseract]

I read "platforms" in that sentence as the different Google platforms: Android on phones, Android on tablets, TV, Chrome, etc.

[luke_s]

Hmmm, funny I read it as the web, iOS and Android. I guess because google already uses their own look and feel for their iOS applications.

Though typically I disagree with what he has to say John Gruber of daring fireball seems to think the same way I do:

"If there’s a hitch, it’s that Google seems to be promoting this as a cross-platform design framework — a way to design just one interface for both iOS and Android. Google’s own apps for iOS already feel like weird moon man apps; now they’re encouraging third-party developers to follow their style rather than iOS’s."

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/06/25/google-design

[dazzla]

I agree. From theverge.com article:

"The design team at Google felt the need to come up with a more coherent look and feel that could be applied across all of its products, from Android to Chrome OS to the web."

[zmmmmm]

The same problem has plagued Android tablet apps. Google has tried to pursue the notion that you don't really need separate apps for phone and tablet; one single app can be made of fragments that rearrange in suitable ways to work on either phone or tablet. The problem is that this is only true if you accept a mediocre common denominator between the two platforms. If you are striving for pure excellence - the very best you can possibly create - then you really need to design for the ground up for every form factor. I think this is why even today people say Android doesn't have enough "tablet apps" even though it's objectively not true - it has the apps, but they don't feel superior enough on the tablet. It betrays to me an inferiority complex - Google doesn't believe people will invest the time to design apps from the ground up for tablet form factor. So they push this message that you shouldn't do that, and the self-fulfilling prophecy comes true.

[mirsadm]

That's just not true. People forget that before smartphones we use to make applications that worked on lots of resolutions. It's not a new thing. In fact what Google is doing is fantastic. They provide the tools to make your app have different layouts on different form factors. Much easier than detecting when the resolution changed on a CRT screen and then trying to scale everything accordingly.

[andybak]

Yep and apple are feeling the pinch of their strategy. New products need to either have a screen that is an even multiple of previous screen sizes - or they need to guide developers through a moderately painful migration.

[Silhouette]

In fact what Google is doing is fantastic. They provide the tools to make your app have different layouts on different form factors.

But only as long as what you're laying out looks and works the same on every platform and gives good results in all cases.

We used to have this issue in desktop software development. MS and Apple had quite different UI standards for their respective platforms, and if you just naively ported an application from one OS to the other without considering the details then it just wouldn't feel right in a hundred little ways that added up.

The current trend for trying to homogenize native mobile apps, web apps, desktop apps, and anything else we can call an app, seems like a retrograde step. It makes development cheaper, but different platforms are useful for different things and they are used in practice in different ways. There is way too much hammering square pegs into round holes right now.

Ironically, Google's own sites are often excellent examples. Analytics, for one, is literally unusable on various tablets (notably iOS ones using mobile Safari), because they've tried to be too clever with standardising their look and feel instead of using native system controls. What they've actually done is cause a bunch of content not to even appear in the viewable area and broken the normal idioms for basic interactions like zooming and scrolling that would otherwise have fixed that.

[zmmmmm]

> They provide the tools to make your app have different layouts on different form factors

This is exactly what I stated above, and my argument is that it is suboptimal to having a design from the ground up for a specific form factor. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's never as good as designing from the start with the exact form factor in mind. And it's absolutely more work for the developer. But that's the point - Google is encouraging developers to take the easy road: not to develop a separate app but instead make a few tweaks to their phone app so that it lays out better on a tablet while not addressing the fundamental difference in scope and complexity that a tablet app can offer.

[enraged_camel]

>>Trying to achieve design consistency across platforms was going to annoy your users. Instead you should strive for _branding_ consistency across platforms and use native interaction patterns.

Yep. Case in point: the Windows 8 "Metro" fiasco.

[Silhouette]

I was wondering whether my general dislike of some current design trends -- specifically, flat design, use of animation for its own sake, and trying to present homogeneous appearance and behaviour across very different platforms -- was just a personal bias, a consequence of my general preference for "tried and tested" over "trendy but seems worse than before".

So, over the past few weeks I've been asking a few friends and family what they think of things like iOS 7, Windows 8, flat styling on web sites, and the like.

Quite a few responses to my completely unscientific study have been downright negative, such as "boring", "childish", or "dumbed down". "I can't find anything any more" was probably the most common form of complaint about behaviour rather than style, particularly regarding Windows 8 and the UI formerly known as Metro. Some people have been more moderate, for example giving two-way comments like "this might work well on a touch screen but it's awkward on my laptop" or "it's very simple".

Most telling to me is that absolutely no-one has actually come down in favour of either iOS 7 or Windows 8 overall so far, while I know at least one person who is trying to return a brand new iPad after a week because they "hated it" and several who have at some point in the recent past bought a device and either chosen Windows 7 over Windows 8 or actively downgraded after purchasing. People are literally avoiding or even returning or rapidly reselling new devices just to avoid these kinds of UIs.

I'm sad, though unsurprised, to see Google following Microsoft and Apple down this evolutionary dead end. As others have commented in this discussion, it seems like reducing everything to the least common denominator. To me, it also seems like promoting tools that make it cheap and quick to build software and web sites with maximum reach -- essentially, a direct commercial advantage -- rather than promoting tools that help you build software and web sites that are any good.

[treenyc]

The hardware is also different on each platform, e.g the iPhone hardware button layout vs android button layout. That effects the layout and user interaction.

[NedStarkkk]

I agree with you. Although Material is great, it doesn't mean the quality of Android apps will be improved quickly. Maybe google need to try harder to expand the influence of his guideline.

[gpmcadam]

    > I think that material is great design, 
    > but terrible strategy and in the end 
    > may land up resulting in the Android 
    > design space being worse, not better.

The Android design space has room to get worse?!