I have been super busy lately working on the beginnings of a Mobile Pattern Library for a client. This work involves a lot of auditing applications. I am looking at both apps designed by the client and others in the landscape for comparison and for developing best practices across the iPhone, iPad, an Android handset and an Android tablet.
I can honestly say that while there are a lot of crappy iPhone apps, there are 10x the amount of bad ones in the Android ecosystem. I know, this is probably not new to many but was an interesting thing for me. On the other hand, I have gotten used to the hard back button on the Android and was extremely surprised by how much I like the Android tablet.
The best experience so far was a moment of “it just works” on the tablet. When I got the Android tablet – an ASUS tansformer tablet – I signed into my google accounts and without any prompting from me, any apps that I had downloaded on the Android handset self-installed into the tablet. This was a very surprising but cool experience.
On the other hand, I am extremely surprised by the application makers, on both the iPad and the Android tablet who don’t bother to refactor for the increased real estate and just expect the app to be either tiny or stretched to fit the space. I know many of these apps are free and people want to get their app out there before the competition, but my time is worth money and I want to love these applications and right now I don’t because of the perceived laziness of the app creators.
More thoughts soon as I collect screen shots and the adjust more global patterns for public consumption.
