Google sure took its time (almost three years) to start focusing on making Android look more mature and visually appealing, starting with the major design shift in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, which was extremely well received by users and reviewers alike. And, according to a former Apple engineer, Google is “getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.”
Former Apple engineer Patrick B. Gibson writes on his personal blog that Google provides web services that just work and has also been getting better at design, something which Apple has always been excellent at, faster than the Cupertino company is getting better at web services. He feels that Apple can’t match the speed and efficiency of Google, as almost “anything Apple does which involves the internet is a mess”, save for the excellent web browser teams responsible for making Safari.
Gibson also says that Apple should buy Twitter as they use some of the most advanced web technology, most of which they invented themselves. Here are some examples he cites for Apple’s poor web skills:
- Apple can’t update its online store without taking it offline first.
- A popular Game Center game was able to bring down the entire network.
- Apple requires you to re-friend everyone on Game Center, Find my Friends, and Shared Photostreams.
- Notes requires an email account to sync.
- The iTunes and App Stores are still powered by WebObjects, a mostly dead framework written almost 20 years ago.
- iMessage for Mac lives in an alternate dimension in which time has no ordered sequence.
- Ping.
Gibson goes on to note that on the other hand, Google continues improving Android’s design, and while he finds Android still ugly and having lesser quality of polish and feel as Apple’s software, he finds it a big improvement over Android of yesteryear and believes that Google is moving at quite a fast pace, specially with features such as Google Now and near-instant voice commands, which give “Android a serious leg up on iOS”.
In my opinion, Gibson is pretty spot on with his observations, at least when it comes to Google getting better at design. While iOS is already quite polished, Apple has been stagnating and sticking to the same interface for a few years now and also hasn’t done much on the features front, except bring Siri to the smartphone world, something which Google Now beats quite comfortably.
Android still has a long way to go in polish and consistency (which did get a bit ruined with that clock in Android 4.2, which looks great but doesn’t sit well with the rest of the design of the OS), but with Google also working on features along with the interface itself, they are surely moving at a fast pace while Apple plays safe with their OS that “just works”, while apparently doing quite poorly in the area of web technology.
Hit the source link to read up on the entire post made by Gibson, and do tell us what you think of all this.
Discussion