The USS Quad Damage

I’m fairly excited for Android ICS. Unfortunately, it continues on a trend of making Android more like an iPhone, and removes a lot of really nice features on the older Android platforms. Here’s some things that I liked on my HTC Magic (1.5) that aren’t as good on my Nexus S (2.3), and suspect are even worse on the Galaxy Nexus (4.0):

Hardware buttons

I liked proper hardware buttons on Android. Not just capacitive buttons, but real, honest, buttons. Things you could feel without pressing them. A lot of Android stuff could be done without looking at the screen. The search button was a personal fav. I could long-press search and call someone. Pressing menu was a slightly more reliable way of unlocking the phone, and could be done before I even looked at the screen. And this one is silly, but I used the “back” button sort of like the ADD “AC” key on a calculator.

I should make specific mention of the Hardware Ring / Hang up buttons. The old action of picking up and hanging up the phone, something I used to do before smart-phones, was a habit I could keep with my magic, but not with the Nexus S. I need to look at the screen, which is way more distracting than it appears. I’m now confined to iPhone-esque attention-grabbing gestures.

Minimalism

The original design aesthetic of Android was to use the entire screen to show the useful stuff. Shove the settings and things on a different menu, out of the way. If you wanted access to them, you press Menu, or you long-hold on the thing you care about. Now, it’s all short press on buttons which bring up extra features. This is more visible, sure, but also more cluttered in equal measure.

I find myself accidentally selecting items when I mean to scroll, and selecting items brings up a new menu, which often persists through the scroll. The thing with Android is that it’s far more powerful than an iPhone, so the long press was a way of getting rid of a lot of the buttons and functionality and hiding it. Want to ring someone on Twitter? The old action would be to long press their username. Now you have to select their name and a new menu comes up and you select the “call” button.

This probably has implications — Android traditionally isn’t a series of “applications”, rather an environment full of “tasks” which can inter-weave apps. ICS seems to be going down the road of a more discrete app environment. If you want to share data around you have to bring up ageing APIs.

Hardware mouse

Anyone who says this is a bad idea can just go die in a ditch. The biggest problem with touchphones is that your damn hand covers 80% of it. Scrolling while reading is just a pain. It’s a constant dance of moving your hand in the way to scroll to where you want, then moving it out of the way to actually read. The little trackball was a great way to just read. It was like the scroll wheel to the mouse.

And it was like playing with a nipple. What’s not to like?

The Grunge

The original Android was a bit like Brutalism. It wasn’t pretty, but it felt like it stood for something, and that in itself had a quiet nobility about it. The thing that escapes me is how the iPhone is meant to have modernist design, but the principles themselves are completely different from modernism. The kitsch of the modernist success story contrasting with the failure of the modernist ideals — something for everyone. In the past you would call other Android users “comrades”. In the future, it might be a condescending “Buddy”.

Still, there’s an Arduino plugin, and ICS is back to being open. And in the end, ICS is really just a cleaner, more friendly brutalism. I hope.

I’m sure all of these things amount to not a lot of pain. I don’t really think the lack of these features will make Android significantly worse, but it is a shame. It’s as if Palm gave up on their iconic graffiti. Far from giving the Android a soul, ICS seems to be a soulectomy to make, perhaps, an affable but fringe “the dude” turn into a vacuuous but popular “Edward”.

[EDIT: I’ve now had my hands on ICS for a couple of days, here are my thoughts. I’m going to mostly make notes on this excellent review]

The new Send button is just plain crazy. I see what they’re trying to achieve, it’s a paper airplane / arrow thing, but man it just looks like a play button. If it was multiple arrows, like a “GO GO GO” button I’d be happier, but as it stands it’s a bit silly looking.

Those “…” things should just be removed. I don’t think anyone would notice or care.

It’s interesting that danny thinks the back and enter buttons look like “send”. I think it comes from twitter. Even in Android the reply is an arrow pointing to the left. Point it to THE RIGHT YOU ARE SENDING A MESSAGE! This is icons 101. I think the back button should look just like a browser back button. The HTC Magic back button looks almost the same as the twitter “send” button, and I thought it was a nice unambiguous button. I blame twitter for making the waters murky.

That “open apps” button is probably the single most useless button in the world.

I have far fewer “menu” buttons popping up than Danny (because I have a hard menu button). As a result, the menu buttons on my phone, so they actually seem consistent. I also have the search button.

Interestingly, I think I’m better off in some ways with the nexus S compared to the galaxy nexus, owing to the hardware buttons. That silly “menu” icon doesn’t appear for me, and the home button is not right below the space bar so I can type just fine. And I have search. Hopefully there’s a setting somewhere in the Galaxy Nexus which brings back the old style buttons. That would probably fix half of Danny’s qualms.

People have been talking in some detail over the UI performance of Android, the almost sub-conscious lag that makes android just not “feel” right.

It’s fairly silly to whinge about implementation details when you have the world’s best coders on each of Google and Apple’s side. You know they wouldn’t have just built something in a stupid way. Some people have been putting the differences down to culture. That’s really a nice way of saying the following:

Android can do things the iPhone just plain can’t.

In order to make sense of this you need to look back in time, when the platforms were substantially different, compared to now, where they’re substantially the same (and perform similarly — iPhone 4S can be jittery sometimes, and Android ICS is a lot smoother. Similarly, if you used IOS5 on an iPhone 3GS you can expect it to run like Android Cupcake on an HTC Magic).

When I got my HTC Magic, out of the box, it had notifications and background apps. Not only was I now always online in Google Talk, as well as having Google Calendar and Mail integration, I also got an app that got me online in MSN, Facebook, Yahoo, and even ICQ. This is actually online — If someone sends me a message, I get a notification. There were even apps to do location based notifications, and Google’s Latitude (which is like 4 square, but you don’t have to do anything to “check in”). To me, this was the entire point of having a smart-phone. I looked at the iPhone and went “it responds well, but what can I do with it”.

The Android’s killer app for me was that I never needed to take it out of my pocket. It would be “doing things” — processing, whatever, and it would let me know if I needed to care. Contrast this with the iPhone, which I saw as having that beer drinking app and sending those “whale” text messages. Cute, but… why?

It’s only now that you could claim a sort of feature parity between the iPhone and Android. And that comes at a cost. Even now, though, the iPhone isn’t as flexible as an Android. You can’t share things from one app to another arbitrarily (I think the iPhone has specific hooks to share via twitter, but you can’t add the option to share via flickr). Even the background apps are somewhat limited, and the new storage scheme means many apps have had to re-think their utility.

That’s the thing with Android apps vs iPhone apps. iPhone apps feel a little contrived. They’ve been created for use on the iPhone in an acceptable way, and I can feel them trying to do things the system won’t let them do. Android, by contrast is, in the words of Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson: Ambitious but rubbish. They have enough rope to hang themselves, and they do. There are apps that can use location information to toggle wifi on or off, but end up taking up more battery figuring out whether they should switch off wifi than they save by switching off wifi.

But the thing is, you can do it. You’ve always been able to do it. Android today and Android when it first launched is largely the same, but tweaked. iOS5 vs the original iOS is probably fundamentally different.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Apple have always reduced the feature set to deliver a better user experience for the features that did exist. The first iPhones didn’t do video calls and didn’t have copy-paste. They were just plain less capable. Android’s thrown everything in and tried, but not quite succeeded. Just like Android zealots talk down the lag issues, iPhone zealots talk down the lack of features.

For my money, I never really cared about the lag. I just cared even less for that crappy beer drinking app.