Android can be beautiful

Android is no longer an ugly-duckling platform trying to catch up with iOS, but a beautiful platform that truly rivals iOS in all important ways -- and now surpasses it in terms of market share. However, mobile app developers have only recently begun to transition from "we need an app for Android too, quick!" to "we need great apps for <i>both</i> Android and iOS," so it will take a little while for all those ugly, hastily-put-together Android apps to become a thing of the past.<p>UPDATE: koko775 raises a good point: the large installed base of pre-ICS Android versions may also be a factor. See <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533819" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533819</a>

I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc.<p>I would think that web designers, and designers in general, would be happy with the flexibility to create their own thing rather than having something that pretty much looks like everything else.<p>The web used to have some consistencies, like &#60;A&#62; tags rendering as blue with an underline and always loaded a new page, but that's long since gone. Nowadays designers are free to make links look and work how they want.<p>I, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. I prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same.

Since ICS, Android <i>is</i> beautiful. Well, the OS core is, anyway. Widget makers and the like still don't seem to have got the design memo, but I suspect that's because design talents are so focused on iOS.<p>We just need the app makers to catch up. Foursquare, for instance, has been redesigned and looks great. However, their widgets haven't been touched and look awful by comparison. Spotify has done a far better job of updating everything at once.

The problem with the Android UI isn't (only) the lack of beauty, it's the lack of consistency, style and attention to detail. Things like included/used fonts (although the default iOS notes app also fails horribly here), placement of back buttons. And that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the Android UI, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing. In iOS the 'back' button is always on the same location AND tells you where you're going back to. Android has a dedicated button, and it surprised me more than enough where it was taking me back to.<p>So yes, Android could use a better/cleaner visual style, but that's not it's biggest problem. Also, if a new visual style would be adopted, it should be universal. Right now it's a mess of apps trying to do their own thing because the default style is ugly, and these examples demonstrate that perfectly... Android 4 has shown some improvement but I still don't like it.<p>There are also quite a few iOS apps that don't necessarily respect the general look&#38;feel of iOS, but some of them succeed in having a distinct style without clashing badly with the rest of the interface. Hell, Google showed that it is capable of doing just this, just look at the Google+ and the new YouTube app, they are pretty neat.<p>I think Android UI designers should use iPhones and Windows 7/8 phones as their daily device, or switch at least once every week. Then they'd see what's wrong, what irritates them about every OS and find a way around some of the moronic decisions were made in some of these OS's, and all are guilty of this to some extend. Android at this moment however gets the crown in usability WTF's.<p>Disclaimer: I own an iPhone and iPad, but mainly develop for Android/BB/WinMobile.

These seem really inconsistent to me. Feedly looks almost like a metro (sorry, "Windows 8-style") app. doubleTwist looks like an iOS app, as do Square Card Reader and Tumblr. Reddit Sync Pro seems to fit in with Google+, so I assume that's what modern Android apps are supposed to look like.<p>None of these general aesthetics are bad, but the inconsistency seems to be an issue. (Actually, a few of them do look bad to me, like Rdio, with the very dated "app home screen" that looks like it was copied from the old Facebook iOS app.)

Of course Android <i>can</i> be beautiful if you showcase a few screen shots created by some very talented designers. After spending the last 4 years as an Android developer, its clear that the platform falls short in two places at the intersection of UX and UI. I've worked with some of the best designers and they always produced beautiful assets and screens, but we were always left making important UX decisions that caused inconsistency with other apps. The "beauty" that many users come to appreciate with iOS and Metro, is the cross app consistency, experience and cohesion with the operating system itself. Even apps produced by Google have a tremendously wide gap in consistency. The other major problem is development decisions made (and allowed by the platform) by software engineers. More than a few of the apps in this list do unthinkable things like processing data on the UI thread or having terrible offline experiences. This can turn a beautifully designed app into a terrible app very quickly.<p>It's important to distinguish "looks pretty" and "beautiful".

Reminds me of what Chief Creative Officer at doubleTwist said about designing for Android:<p>&#62;&#62; As it stands, If you design a great app for Android and people say 'hey, that looks like an Android app', that means you've failed.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/sdw/status/187245772205600769" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/sdw/status/187245772205600769</a>

I agree that Android can look gorgeous, but that can only go so far. Android's problem is consistency. I've used every alternate android build I could find, and the custom (and default) themes and UI menu system lacked consistency. My favorite was MiUi and even that had terrible consistency issues.<p>iOS, on the other hand, is supremely superior in this department. The cohesiveness of the experience is second to none. I value that over custom configurations any day. My android phones have been wonderful hack-fests, but at the end of the day, the one thing I can't hack into them is a consistent experience.

It's already known that since ICS Android is prettier and more functional than iOS.

Some of these are really nice. I'm curious how many of these are Android-specific though. Path looks pretty similar on iOS and so do FourSquare, Flipboard etc. Which of these are examples of good mobile design that holds itself on various platforms (iOS, Android etc.) and which are unique to Android?

is it bad if i find it inconsistent, annoying to use, etc?<p>I mean, it is pretty (well, arguably, most of them are), but, the buttons are all over the place and everyone seems to have it's own UI plastered on top of more or less "android ui compliant" stuff.

I like the screenshots but I don't understand the navigation of the page and why would you hijack the default scrollbar of your browser?<p>I'm surprised that so apps look WP metro style

I don't think anyone has ever proposed that Android couldn't be beautiful but rather great design comes secondary to iOS. As far as innovative products go, I'd argue that this is still very much the case.<p>Flipboard set a standard for beautiful news applications. Path reimagined what social could be on mobile and made numerous UI innovations. Instagram took a novel concept and made photosharing exciting to a new audience. Square showed off the increasing real business viability by making payments accessible to anyone with a phone. All these apps weren't available on Android for some time. Sure they are now but this far more a matter of increasing market share than a change of opinions and it continues to hold true as we see well-designed apps like Paper start iOS only. Android is by no means the epicenter of creativity on mobile and though beautiful, the ports largely still have substandard experiences than their iOS counterparts.<p>In my opinion this is a result of equal parts hardware and audience. Android may be on more devices as a whole but many of the devices are not even remotely competitive with top-tier smartphones. They are sold with the intention of being budget friendly and thus it becomes a hassle to acquire the additional devices, adapt interfaces to the numerous screen sizes on them, and adjust for performance limitations. I also believe that the design of the iPhone naturally attracts great designers. Android has a reputation of throwing good hardware into poorly designed phones with cheap materials and inferior build quality - the future is just not as cool when you need to interact with plastic buttons. Lastly, I believe the iPhone audience is naturally more in tune to seek out great designed products. The openness that appeals to Android customers creates an expectation that applications should be free. There is a decreased interest in browsing the marketplace and many of the most popular apps are just free copycats of popular iPhone applications.

Very happy to see the Bump 3.0 on there (I worked on it). ICS and all of it's native apps were a great statement by Google to show how they'd like their apps to look and feel. We followed their queue and used the action bar and view pager to great success. Also having a great visual designer doesn't hurt either.

It's comical/ironic how difficult that site is too browse.

For anyone looking for a fully-featured notes app, Catch, mentioned in TFA, is the way to go. It does sync, has a web interface, and probably a 100 other features I haven't used.

I'm surprised to see so many comments claiming these apps look like Metro. Frankly the level of design on WP is much lower - third-party apps are extremely low quality and all of MS's apps are much simpler and lack the richer textures and details of these apps. Judged on these screenshots, Android looks much nicer than WP, and seems to strike the right balance between clarity and detail.

another similar Android app design blog <a href="http://www.holoeverywhere.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.holoeverywhere.com/</a>

Android can also be really ugly <a href="http://fuglyandroid.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://fuglyandroid.tumblr.com/</a> :P

Reading this list, I just realized how useless all these apps feel. With the exception of Google Maps, when you really need it.

There are some very nice looking apps in there.<p>Kind of meta but IMO the screenshots on that site are too big and should be scaled down a bit.

Some more themes are on Reddit:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/androidthemes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/androidthemes/</a>

Humbling. I though I was doing really well making Android apps, but these examples remind me how far there is to go.

With ICS, android introduced a new design language and look and feel and usability have improved. But nevertheless, we have always found the default UI recommendations need to be overridden at least 10-20% of times to get a usable app. And yes, ICS still looks like a cross of iOS and Windows Phone 7.

It's good to see that Android is improving in this area. And I say that as an Apple "fanboi". That said, it is unfortunate that the ecosystem still suffers from heavy fragmentation, so only a small portion of users will be seeing the benefits mentioned in the article.

Slightly off topic, but anyone else notice that that site/page seems to somehow choke on something. It spun up my CPU over something, I think resizing the images or something. Don't have the time to look or care.

This is a list of apps that in no way use the android default widgets. So yes, it can be beautiful when you do all the hard work yourself.<p>(and yes, these apps look fantastic)

It steadily becomes more user-friendly, but there will always be a lot of problems with different devices, and mostly with their screen size

...but only if you skip regular UI conventions

Are there other similar sites that showcase mobile app design? Best is one that covers Android, iOS and Metro apps.

It can be beautiful on the large-screen top models like Nexus S, S2, S3 and so on that are owned by geeks, not on the LG Optimus-ish and other low-quality phones that regular people buy. On my Samsung Galaxy S Mini not so much, for example I couldn't install Path because the screen is too small.

I just dont see. Beatuiful is extremely subjective, so the title of this is inherently incorrect. And beautiful they may be, but they are not usable, consistent, or friendly. And the ones that are close to being good, have niggling issues like spacing between items, which drives me nuts

The great irony is that page runs terrible on my galaxy2 tablet..

Beautiful != Consistency

Beautiful != usable

I really like the Google+ app, it's lovely.

Great site, thank you.

Oh for the love of God, we still need convincing of this? Anyone with an ICS/JB phone knows that Android is perfectly capable of looking good. My "least-good" looking application that I use on a regular basis is the Flashlight app, and even then, it's just a big round glossy button.

Looks somewhat inspired by Metro... not that that's a bad thing. ICS made a huge stride in the Android UI, and Google was even talking up the new font during the announcement.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f92ptAjm3I" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f92ptAjm3I</a><p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&#38;v=f17ujh98k-U" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&#38;v=f...</a>

This site contains a stack overflow bug which crashes Firefox and IE9 on Windows.<p>Flagged.

"Android can be beautiful" eh? Saying it doesn't make it so. As an aspiration it is so far from current reality as to be simply delusional.