Google’s apps look and feel increasingly out of place on Apple’s iOS

“Google’s decision to use Material Design has rubbed some iOS users the wrong way,” Jim Lynch writes for CIO. “My own feeling about this is that companies should make it a point to respect the design language of the platform they are developing for, since anything else seems to anger the majority of users on that platform. This is really just common sense, if you are going to release an app for iOS then make it look like an iOS app and vice versa for Android apps.”

“I think that the reason companies like Google don’t do this is simple laziness, as well as an unwillingness to spend a little more development money to tweak an app’s design to match the design language of the platform it is going to run on,” Lynch writes. “But is it really worth it to skip a little more work or save a few bucks while angering users and driving them away from your apps? I don’t think so.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t see Google changing its behavior anytime soon. The company seems blithely unaware of how many iOS users dislike Material Design on the iPhone and iPad. So Google will probably bumble along, making the same design mistakes that they’ve been making so far,” Lynch writes. “I hope, however, that Apple learns from Google’s mistakes and makes it a point to make Apple Music and any other apps it makes for Android use Material Design instead of Apple’s usual iOS design language. It’s the best way to satisfy users on Android and avoid alienating them from Apple’s products.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Before seemingly doing little more than porting their apps from Android to iOS, Google should have listened to Steve Jobs in 2010 when he explained why allowing devlopers to use Adobe’s shiteous Flash to create iOS apps would result in poor, lowest-comon-denominator apps:

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Smart developers, unlike Google, design their apps for specific platforms’ capabilities, design language, and conventions.