The State of Enthusiast Apps on Android

Apple has really managed to get people excited about app development in a way that Google isn't even near.

On Android the bar is set at "it does what it says on the box", so no attempt at pleasing the user or, heaven forbid, surprising them by exceeding their expectations.

Many apps have five to six year old interfaces etc. Ugly buttons on ugly tables.

BitTorrent clients and file managers all look like windows 95.

Compare and contrast macOS, where the enthusiasm has all but dried up, and "good enough" is actually often better and more functional on the other platforms.

(As a preamble, I may not be the usual audience for this blog. I used Mac forever, even a Newton, and had an iPod Touch, but decided against iOS's. I now use Linux at home and Mac at work.)

As an Android user, I use my phone closer to the original vision of the iPhone. I use mostly the built-in apps and for most everything else, I use the web. I do have the Fastmail app, a couple 2FA apps, an ebook reader, a daycare app that I have to have to sign in my kid, and I prefer Firefox for Android. But RSS, news reading and so, I use the browser. This is actually the same on my computer really, which is why switching from Mac to Linux was easy for me.

I switched from NetNewsWire to web-based RSS reader way back – Bloglines first (I think?), then Google Reader, one that's now defunct and now Miniflux – when I realized I was missing some feeds' items since they only included the last 10 items but refreshed more often than I check on my computer. I also often do things like open links in new tabs, so an app is very limiting.

Same for news — I've never wanted news apps since I tend to open lots of tabs, not be mention being able to use ad blocking and user styles.

I've never been a Twitter user, but all the recent discussion of Twitter apps surprised me since I would never use anything but their website. But maybe that's why I'm not a Twitter user.

The long and short of it is I don't really need many apps – good, bad or ugly – to use my Android phone how I use it.

Yet, somehow Apple keeps finding new ways to burn through its reserves of goodwill with devs.

A current Android phone has almost all the apps I need- mostly because Google took all the ideas I needed from Play Store apps, and put them in the OS.

I doubt we will see many great apps in future. It costs a lot of money to develop a great app, and it is too easy to copy the signature features of an app.

I read Twitter/Mastodon on my desktop Firefox- There is nothing special about Twitter's use case that makes me want to use an app. Use RSS on Firefox as well for certain sites- never aggregating feeds, though.

Could simply be that Android users don't consider their phones to be status items, and don't look for the shiniest applications... People who conceive of themselves as Walmart shoppers instead of Louis Vitton shoppers.

Neither of these posts seem particularly curious about why certain UI conventions evolve within the app economies of different platforms, and instead want to make absolute declarations about what are pretty clearly subjective values. It's almost as if the desire to consider apps as a kind of art, and to value their "emotional appeal" and "the feel of [them]" is fundamentally incompatible with the desire to decide which apps do or do not fall into an ordered "top five" ranking. I don't see why an unadorned, animation-less app can't have just as much care, detail-sweating, and niceness as one with a non-brutalist UI?

I don't see why an unadorned, animation-less app can't have just as much care, detail-sweating, and niceness as one with a non-brutalist UI?

I don't see how one could. The apps in discussion don't seem to be choosing ugliness by design, or focusing their energies instead on features.

Gruber wrote a piece in which the thesis is that mastodon apps on iOS will "make your heart sing".

Johnny Tillotson said it better:

When I see my baby
What do I see
Poetry
Poetry in motion…

One enthusiast app that Android has and Apple forbids: A web browser with a fully functional ad blocker.

Indeed. An ongoing conceit of apologists like Gruber is simply that functionality envy is a failure of character, rather than a healthy necessity. He might deny it--try to pretend otherwise, or minimise his generalisations--but the evidence is pretty clear that the Apple faithful defend their choice not on the basis of balances of priorities, which is the sensible way to look at it, but as a kind of status affirmation. Sad, because it ends up denying the very real functional limitations of Apple platforms, whilst giving a free pass to the user-hostile crap that comes out over in the other gardens. In the end though, as users, we ultimately have to make a choice to prioritise functionality and ease-of-use, among other things particular to platforms, and it's getting harder and harder (for me, anyway) to stick at least with macOS despite my love of the platform's former shadow and the hardware that runs it.

I don't see how one could. The apps in discussion don't seem to be choosing ugliness by design, or focusing their energies instead on features.

Part of my point here is that beauty and ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. I haven't used these apps, but I don't think their makers are trying to make them bad on purpose (thought John Gruber does actually kind of imply he thinks this).

@Moonlight To me it seemed clear that Gruber was not implying that. Also, a lot of the issues mentioned are not to do with ugliness but also features and design in the “how it works” sense.

@Michael Maybe it's just my reading of it, then. But when he's repeatedly asserting that Android developers are not trying to make their apps nice and sweating the details, the unanswered question is "what are they trying to do instead?" -- and his implications don't paint a very pretty picture.

But I don't want to get too bogged down in closely reading these posts for subtext. This whole bit of discourse is radiating very strong us-vs-them energy that I find unpleasant.

@Moonlight I think his second piece is saying that they’re not targeting the qualities he cares about because they lack the eye/taste. It’s not a conscious decision but rather that they just “don’t perceive it.” (I’m not making a judgement myself and haven’t used any of the apps in question.)

As an addendum, I think before any iOS user passes judgment on Android, they should install F-Droid and just browse around. It's an entire 'store' of free/open-source apps made by people who want to make something useful for themselves and others. It's such a different experience than trying to browse the App Store.