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0 pointsyoungtaff11y ago0 comments

> There's some neat things about Android for sure. But it's hard to believe there's people out there who are frequent users of both and think a superior UX is one of those things.

I've got a Nexus 4, iPhone 4S, iPad and a few others beside and I'd argue for me that Android does have superior UX.

There's no way I could use the 4S as my daily phone, and I've put off getting a new tablet until there's a decent 8" Android one out.

Sure iOS has plenty of polished apps but the integration between them is at Apple's whim - to share a webpage from Safari to GetPocket, I have to rely on bookmarklets FFS.

iOSs keyboard is another deal breaker for me, after using Swype hunt and peck for typing on a touch screen is horrible and then there's trying to make sense as to whether shift is on or not!

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ssmoot11y ago

I wouldn't call the iOS keyboard "hunt and peck". You only need the visual for alignment. Otherwise your touch-typing skills seem to transfer pretty well. I mean, I don't have to wonder where the T key is before my thumb is moving towards it.

Calling the lack of Swype a deal-break seems perfectly reasonable to me though. To each their own. I saw my typing speed go through the floor on the MotoX, but that was due to two issues mostly:

1. Different key spacing. Which is entirely justified. I'm just not used to what I'm not used to. I imagine I'd have a similar frustrating re-training curve on the iPhone 6.

2. The lack of an easy apostrophe. You can tweak the stock keyboard a little bit, but mostly this one was nearly unforgivable to me. I try to get punctuation right and it drives me crazy that the stock Android keyboard seemed to be working against me there. Some alternative keyboards looked a little better, but they were almost universally tacky IMO and could've seriously used a few hours from an actual designer.

As a developer whose experience with designers is generally pretty frustrating (XHTML or Go Home! ... a few years later ... CSS for mobile first, and Desktop with media-queries, who cares if it breaks IE8 for no reason and has 0 advantages? It's Mobile-First to an extreme and you're a joke if you don't put the latest fad ahead of maintenance/functionality!) that almost hurts to say. ;-)

I haven't been able to make "Swyping" a habit. I've got no muscle memory for it. But almost everyone else I've met that's tried it loves it so I'm sure that's just me.

I'd be curious what parts of Android's UX you consider superior though. I could understand not wanting to make the 4S your daily phone just because of the screen size if nothing else. Plus iOS7 is pretty (IMO), but generally a step back in actual UX IMO with all the lagging issues (which seem to have improved a lot, but still occasionally annoying).

On the other hand the 4S's battery will be going well into the next day while the Nexus 4 would be on at least it's second charging cycle IME. The line where hardware issues qualify as UX is a bit fuzzy though I suppose.

I don't know what GetPocket is. But generally you can just hit the share/arrow button and copy if you're just interested in an address. I've found that to be a really comfortable workflow personally. I'm always pasting URLs, Images, etc into Hipchat.

Anyways, thanks for the respectful disagreement/comments. Certainly refreshing. Hopefully my end of the conversation holds up as well.

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