iOS Rules Don’t Apply Here

It’s an uncomfortable truth for an Android phone owner, but one that I knew about going in: the app situation isn’t as good as on iOS. At the same time, I find that I’m happy with it anyway, which is surprising. I look at the store and see that it has fewer applications. I look at the games section and see that it has ridiculously fewer applications. I look at the blogs and see issue after issue raised about how hard it is on developers. And yet, it has everything I need, and most Android users are satisfied with it.

John Gruber states that there aren’t any must-have Android apps out there, which is true. I find, however, that the same is true for iOS. Oh, sure, the apps are made better, particularly in the UI department, but I never find myself wishing that I had Pandora, Twitter or Instapaper on a regular basis. I do wish I had Words With Friends¹ and a good RSS client, but that’s it (and Google Reader fits the bill for the latter). Everything else is already there. The apps are rarely superior to iOS, but they’re often good enough that you don’t have anything to complain about.

I’m sure that someone’s going to bring up the lack of games, but that doesn’t apply to me because I’ve come to realize that I don’t really like any of them on iOS or Android, save for Orbital, Angry Birds, Words With Friends and maybe Ramp Champ. All the games on iOS are the kinds of games that reward fast reflexes and good aim and what-not. I want games that reward creativity, games I can get involved in. Right now I have four games on my phone: Angry Birds, Pokemon, Advance Wars and Euchre. The two middle games are, in my opinion, the best mobile games of all time. None of these games require fast reflexes, unless you’ve got a particularly wild set of rules for Euchre. If I saw Orbital and Words With Friends on Android I would consider my game collection complete. (Ramp Champ would be nice, but you’ll never see that game on Android, particularly when it’s the UI that makes it so good.)

There is a large quality jump between Android and iOS, though. The OS itself isn’t forcing the apps to be ugly directly, because if it was there wouldn’t be good examples of well-designed apps in the market. It has to be two things: platform fragmentation, and general apathy on the part of everyone involved.

Android has the worst fragmentation issues of any platform. Theoretically, it shouldn’t be - desktop systems are even more varied than mobiles. The difference is that on the desktop, the application has to be made for its window, not the device itself. There are fewer bugs because the form factor is something you can actually set yourself. On Android, you’re dealt a different environment with every phone. It means a lot of compromises or a limited audience, and this makes it hard on developers.

The apathy, when it comes to UI, comes from everyone. The Android community is focused on, basically, hacking: doing everything possible with their phones. You never see anyone mention the design or user experience of the application - it’s the functionality that matters. That’s understandable because it’s the reason you buy Android phones in the first place: because the iPhone doesn’t fill the role you want it to fill. The iOS community is focused specifically on the quality of applications - an app’s success in the App Store is directly influenced by the quality of an application in a way that just doesn’t happen on Android.

The apathy also comes on the part of developers that don’t really know how to make a good UI. There are exceptions - DoubleTwist and, surprisingly (considering the UI of the desktop version), TweetDeck have very nice UI’s. On the other hand, every RSS application I’ve used is crap. Tumblr’s interface is also poor as well, but I suspect this is because they were following Google’s UI pattern, which brings us to Google’s apathy: they emphasize freedom, which means you’re free not to follow any pattern that they might provide. So, the patterns they do provide kinda suck. The tabs in the Tumblr application look ugly and I wish they had gone their own way on that decision. Google’s apathy also shows even more clearly in the limited reach of paid Market apps - Google’s had Google Checkout for quite a while compared to Apple’s App Store, and Apple reaches more countries anyway.

I also want to note that Windows has much of the same community issues as Android. One of my favorite sayings is that Windows hasn’t had a good application made for it in the last 5 years that isn’t Google Chrome. All the good applications for Windows that I’ve seen are either at least 5 years old (updates don’t count) or are made by Google or Microsoft. If this isn’t true, then this is because Windows also has a community that doesn’t care. The Mac community talks about new apps all the time, and they are usually good apps. Every week or two there’s a new awesome application for the Mac, and if you’re following the community you find out about it. For Windows all I hear is crickets. There’s sites like Lifehacker and Download Squad, but the Windows apps I’ve seen for those seem crummier than anything I’ve seen for Android. If good apps are out there, I can’t find out about it, and the same often goes for Android.

So, iOS has all the good apps because the community cares, Apple cares, development doesn’t suck and there’s a wide audience of app consumers. I still stand by what I said when I said that Android is about as good as iOS on its own merits, but a platform needs good apps to be good itself, and Android is lacking here. That said, its audience isn’t disappointed with Android because by its own standards Android rocks.

What does this mean for the future? Maybe the distribution system for apps won’t improve and Android’s success will be held back. Maybe some fixes for the fragmentation and distribution issues will make developers’ lives easier enough that higher quality makes its way into the Market. Maybe Windows Phone and webOS will steal - wait, no, the issues that Android users have with iOS apply to those two platforms as well. Actually, I figure they might get more people jumping from iOS than they will from Android.

The bottom line is that Android is growing because its audience is different than Apple’s. It grabs some people who prefer iOS, like me, but given studies like this where 7 out of 10 Android users want their next phone to be an Android phone, I have to think that most of them are getting Android phones by choice, not by compromise, and these users are perfectly happy with less awesome apps.