[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.