RE: How to deal with the low quality of Android apps

In reply to: habrahabr.ru/post/178673

I stayed a year on Windows Phone and got rid of that phone at the first opportunity. Now I have a Nexus 4.
Windows Phone is functionally terrible. And the Metro style is not to me to close.

But the first two weeks I really was in some kind of cultural shock. I had a pure Google phone, without any third-party skins, firmware and applications. Only pure googlemy reference.

And, you know what? I don't understand how a company with such resources and such experience designing interfaces, lack of conscience to take money for it.

Note the screenshot on the left. This is the starting screen of the LG Nexus 4. A small exercise:

1) locate the two icons in the same style
2) locate the icon that looks good on a bright orange background
3) try to read the text
4) locate the two icons aligned at the lower boundary.

Seriously. In my opinion, this is not the developers have made the Android platform in a pile of colourful stuff without any hint of front-end community. Did the Google.



Under the icon is a black hole hides a set of other predefined hohlovyh applications:



Suddenly, the two similar icons! g+ and the chat made for each other!
Does Google not have enough designers to make icons of its services recognizable golovami? Or at least put them in the same form?

We have there are: icons on a square base, rectangular, without substrate; with square corners, slightly rounded strongly rounded; there are three different fonts to choose from (not counting the font signatures) and a full range of artistic styles from realism to minimalism.

Go through the standard applications.

Here is a list of contacts:



Top pereklichka on the blue backing, the list on white, the right, the bottom three buttons — search, new contact menu.

Now look list SMS:



We now have the top black bar with the application name, the pictures on the left and in the bottom menu change the order of icons — we now have a new SMS is more important than the search.

Looking further, the list of books, for example:



Now, suddenly, the search moved to the top (now white) die, and the lower panel disappeared altogether.

But local image gallery:



Now we have pure black, black background and some semblance metroshnye tiles. Look at the pictures, according to Google, it is not necessary at all. Tea is not SMS.

Four apps to four interface. Four different dies. Three different places for the button "search". And it is the largest search company in the world?!

Or, check to the head. Watch:



Exercise for telepaths: without looking at the manual, guess what is behind the button with the enema. Oh, by the way, here somehow enema stylized as the common black-and-white interface, and the icon cards for some reason, the hand was raised.

Or, beautiful. Quick settings:



What do you think would happen when you press the Wi-Fi icon? Do not guess, open the settings menu Wi-Fi.
But if not to go to quick settings, and in the usual sort will toggle Wi-Fi:



And so on and so forth. But this, for a moment, 17 major version of the operating system!
Frankly, I just don't understand how in such conditions can be expected from the developers of sane interface, if this interface does not have system applications. How lists organize — on a white background, gray, and black tiles? Pictures to the right or left to put? The search button where? The upper die is what color to do?
Despite all the advantages of the Android operating system, elaborate its interfaces, you can briefly evaluate the word "misery."

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru