Oh and of course you can 'customize everything' and here you have 4 examples of the most ugly homescreens I have ever seen on a mobile phone.
Good grief, you speak of personlisation like it's a bug and not a feature. I personally hate the iOS window-dressing. You have this sleek-looking bit of hardware, but the OS looks plastic and Fisher-Price, with safe and chunky buttons to give to your kid with no sharp edges. The way you speak, it sounds like you would deny me my preference for something different because you think it's ugly. What about those who don't think the default skins look good? Why isn't it a good feature that we can customise the way things look?
I really don't understand the Apple-spawned fanboy cult that considers personalisation to be a bad thing - especially since they once had a successful marketing campaign based around personalising your hardware with the coloured macs.
The moment you say "fanboy" and/or "cult" in reply to a comment you lose a lot of credibility.
" the Apple-spawned fanboy cult"
This is a completely meaningless phrase. It's easy to accuse people of this and impossible to prove. Furthermore when you say something along the lines of "you're just a fanboy of company X" the other guy can just come back and say "well you're a fanboy of company Y" and then everyone sounds ridiculous.
But to your point, I personally like the Apple design and I think that too much customization really can make a beautifully designed piece of hardware look like crap. That said, I also understand that other people either really love customizing their phones and/or have awful taste and that's fine and for them, iOS isn't the best choice. Whatevs. It happens. The thing is, you can't please all the people all the time so I'd say it's a great thing that Apple limits what you can do to personalize the phone. That's one thing that attracts people like me to it. Luckily they're not the only game in town so for the others you have choices.
You're really taking this as a direct insult it seems. I wish you wouldn't have made that fanboy crack because you did have a decent point in there under all the anger.
I'm not fond of making the crack either, to be honest, but I was annoyed by the subtext of what was being said: people make things that are ugly to me, so I don't like customisation.
For the record, I have had two android phones. The first got cyanogenmod put on it, not for UI (though it was prettier than stock), but because I was having reception problems and the carrier was dragging feet in upgrading their image (one of the good things about iOS, this one). The second phone runs stock carrier UI, which I haven't changed.
I didn't take the insult personally for me, but it does annoy the living shit out of me when some people say that others should be personally limited because of aesthetic opinion. There does seem to be this form of opinion that because Apple does design really well, that any design choice made is perfect, therefore the default position is 'apple is right and you are wrong', despite apple making some design blunders along the way.
Chill out and take a deep breath, because you're missing the point entirely. I was talking about the arguments the article gives that supposedly show 'Android is better in almost every aspect', not about the merits of customization itself. No one is denying you anything, like I said: it seems to be more like personal preference than objective superiority. Sure enough Android wins on customizability, but that doesn't automatically mean everyone cares for this particular aspect of the OS.
I always find it amusing how fans of customizability seem to over-estimate the importance of dicking around with something the vast majority of people primarily use as a tool, a useful utility. If the defaults work well (which seems to be the case for iOS, even toddlers appear to be able to use it), that's already much, much better than something that sucks by default but can be customized to suck less.
That said, if you really care about customizability, you can always jailbreak your iPhone and do whatever you like, lots of customizations possible on jailbroken iPhones. Or just buy an Android phone if customizability is high on your list of priority features. Again, this is more about personal preference than anything else.
On a side note:
Years ago when I was just starting to use Linux, I spent weeks customizing every aspect of the look & feel of the user interface. After a while I always got bored with what I had and started to get irritated by the various usability issues my customizations had introduced, so I started over. I went from FVWM to fluxbox, to Gnome, to KDE, back to Gnome, to XFCE and then back to Gnome again. The last time I switched to Gnome I stopped caring about customizations and simply stuck with the defaults, I had more interesting and important things going on in my life to spend time on, instead of wasting my time trying to be smarter than the people who designed the user interfaces I was using. I bought my first Mac running OS X and just used it the way Apple designed it, and never looked back. Since then I lost intereset in customizing my computers and phones altogether, realizing it's more like a hobby than actually making anything 'better', because 9 out of 10 times, you're only making things worse.
You seem to think that 'allows customisation' and 'defaults that work well' are mutually exclusive for some reason. Note that I was responding to your characterisation of personalisation, which was essentially "give people the ability to personalise and they make it ugly!". Yes, to you. Not to them.
I've also never really understood the toddler argument for 'well-designed'. 'Simple', sure, but not 'well-designed'. We don't consider this for any other thing we do - board games aren't considered poorly designed if a toddler can't play them; music isn't considered poorly put together if it's not in thirds, which young kids are drawn to; food isn't considered poor just because a toddler won't eat it, and neither are the utensils to prepare it considered shoddy because a toddler can't use them easily. 'Simple' and 'well-designed' can co-exist, but 'simple' does not mean 'well-designed'.
I also don't really understand your last paragraph - again, you see to be arguing against customisation because you don't enjoy it, despite other people doing it to have fun. Besides, OS UI designers do so for a generic optimal use-case, and can't possibly satisfy all. Even if it's true that 9 times out of 10 you're making it worse, 10% is still a lot of people to satisfy.
>> You seem to think that 'allows customisation' and 'defaults that work well' are mutually exclusive for some reason.
Well often they are, especially in a complex piece of software like a phone OS. Customizability requires trade-offs which may affect usability or performance. More often than not, software that allows skinning looks butt-ugly in the default setting and integrates poorly with the rest of the system (think Java desktop applications etc).
Anyway, you still seem to assume I hate customization just because I have no need for it, while my original comment was about one thing, and one thing only: that customization isn't actually a very strong argument to compare mobile OS'es on, primarily because better defaults always beat customizability (and IMO, looking past the homescreen, taking all aspects of the OS and ecosystem into account, iOS is still miles ahead of Android in that regard), but also because it isn't all that interesting to (I assume) most smartphone users.
>> I've also never really understood the toddler argument for 'well-designed'. 'Simple', sure, but not 'well-designed'.
I'd say 'simple' is almost the penultimate goal of UI design, especially when you are talking about something as complex as a mobile phone. Today everyone takes for granted that even your granny can use a smartphone, but you only have to go back to Windows Mobile to appreciate how much the iPhone has done for smartphone usability. Android users can only be thankful for that because they are profiting from these advancements just as well.
>> We don't consider this for any other thing we do - board games aren't considered poorly designed if a toddler can't play them [..]
I think this is a bit silly, because most board games are intended to be hard, otherwise there wouldn't be any point in playing and winning them. I fail to see the relevance of the other examples. My impression is that you are thinking about 'well-designed' in terms of aesthetics, while I'm thinking about usability and ergonomics. In that context, well-designed is almost a synonym of 'simple' and 'easy to use'. Kids can now operate a smartphone and do things that my parents would have been dumbfounded if they had to do them on a regular PC, yet my mom is perfectly able to find, install and run applications on her iPad, and use it for everything she previously hated to use her PC for. To me, that means we've made progress in terms of usability.
>> I also don't really understand your last paragraph - again, you see to be arguing against customisation because you don't enjoy it
That's a strange way of reading what I wrote, because I what I was saying is that I actually used to enjoy customization until I lost interest in it and found out it almost always makes things worse, not better.
I'd say 'simple' is almost the penultimate goal of UI design
I've run out of time for big swathes, sorry, but I had to comment on this. 'simple' is not the ideal goal of UI design. 'appropriate' is. You want a UI that is best appropriate for the situation. Sometimes this will indeed be simple. Other times it will not be. As an extreme example, could you imagine a cockpit with a single hardware button and a small grid of soft dials?
A more moderate example is that to do serious business work, people still need desktop environments - tablets do not cut it. Mobile OSs are too simple for most serious business work - they don't have an appropriate UI.
Both of your examples are wrong. It is well-known in aerospace industry that cockpit interfaces need vast improvements, and that is actually an active area of research. Pointing to the complexity of an airplane cockpit and saying "look, not all interfaces need to be pretty" betrays a fundamental misunderstanding and/or lack of knowledge about the subject.
Second of all, the reason desktop environments are still preferred for "serious business work" is because of their features, not their UI. I work for a business-to-business software company that has been around for over 25 years, and our product is on version 9. We recently released an iOS app. It is being adopted slowly, but not because of its interface. The interface on it is actually very, very clean and effective. The problem is that we have not yet had the time to port all the features on the desktop version to the iOS version. Therefore it is not used for "serious" work... yet.
I didn't say the cockpit couldn't have improvement, I said could you imagine running one with a smartphone interface. It's really not appropriate for the situation.
Your other example seems to willfully ignore that features are stripped out of mobile OSs for the cause of simplicity, not because they're 'catching up'. Yes, for things that are solely within programs themselves you have a point, but we're talking about the operating system here. Quickly switch between windows? No. Have more than one thing visible at a time? No. Default input mode allows for quick entry of data? No. I mean sure, your program might be the ants pants, but what happens when the user needs to enter data while viewing another document?
>>Yes, for things that are solely within programs themselves you have a point, but we're talking about the operating system here.
I don't think the distinction really matters. In this context, you can think of an operating system as a "master app" that has escalated privileges for things such as root-level access to system functions and the hardware.
>> I mean sure, your program might be the ants pants, but what happens when the user needs to enter data while viewing another document?
This soon won't even be an issue, because the data will not have to be manually transferred between documents by a human user.
Can you really not think of any situation where a person might want to enter data while being able to see another document? Not even a coder looking at a reference guide?
Sure they will. It doesn't have to withstand drop from top of building. Just drop from pocket most of the time. A bit of plastic definitely cushions the blow.
Otter Box seems to be one of the most popular that I see, and it is definitely made to offer some protection.
> That said, if you really care about customizability, you can always jailbreak your iPhone ...
* Yes, you can, for now. There are no guarantees this will happen with future versions of iOS.
* If you jailbreak you are forever a fugitive. You can never again just update, you have to wait and make sure it doesn't kill your setup. You can end up losing your warranty, be refused tech support, etc.
* Finally, from a philosophical standpoint, it is absolutely absurd that I should ever have to break something I have paid for to take full ownership of it. I'm OK with the default being locked down, but be like android and give me the checkbox to open up the rest of the world to me (Android devices are certainly not perfect on this front, though).
I agree with the rest of your points. I also have a similar story, but instead of going to OS X, I just started installing Ubuntu and using the defaults without customization. And that's the way I primarily use my devices. I just think it's ridiculous we're even having this discussion about whether people should have full ownership of devices they've paid for.
>> Finally, from a philosophical standpoint, it is absolutely absurd that I should ever have to break something I have paid for to take full ownership of it.
Actually, if you buy a phone on contract, you didn't pay the full price and aren't entitled to the same rights as someone who paid the full $650+tax sticker price and gets it SIM-unlocked.
The discussion had nothing to do with being SIM unlocked or not, but rather constraints that remain whether you paid full price up front or not.
However the "on a contract" bit is frequently misrepresented I think: when you get a device on contract, in most cases you are being loaned the cost of the device. You have zero recourse to simply return the device when you decide you don't want it any more. There is little to no difference between buying a phone "outright" on a credit card, or getting it "on contract" with your carrier.
>> Yes, you can, for now. There are no guarantees this will happen with future versions of iOS.
[..]
>> If you jailbreak you are forever a fugitive. You can never again just update, you have to wait and make sure it doesn't kill your setup. You can end up losing your warranty, be refused tech support, etc
Well, in a sense that's an inherent risk of customizability, a tradeoff you have to make. Home screen customizations are probably perfectly safe on stock Android, but I'm not sure how more intrusive modifications will affect updating Android phones that are heavily skinned by the manufacturer (ie: most of them). Maybe I'm wrong, but I suppose you can forget about applying major updates to a Samsung TouchWiz or HTC Sense phone without either undoing or screwing up all your customizations, or in the worst case even bricking your phone to the point it needs a factory reset. If customization was at the top of my feature list, I wouldn't risk anything but a stock Android device.
>> Finally, from a philosophical standpoint, it is absolutely absurd that I should ever have to break something I have paid for to take full ownership of it.
From a philosophical point of view you can have all kinds of opinions, assertions and beliefs about anything. In reality, what you are calling absurd applies to a very significant majority of products you can buy in stores. You can tune your car, but don't expect the dealer to fix it under warranty. You can modify the OS on your desktop computer, but don't expect Microsoft or Apple to supply patches to the problems you may introduce, or even make sure stock patches don't break your setup. You can make most electronic devices do things they were never designed for, but the risk of breaking them is all on you.
Here on HN, we take customizing hardware and software for granted and think it's only natural to modify it to make it better suit our needs, but I don't think a whole lot of people around here think the same about modifying (for example) their furniture, their clothes, their kitchen appliances, etc. But I'm pretty sure their are lots of people on other websites talking about exactly those kinds of things, people who wouldn't even think about customizing their mobile phone or PC. I realize this is getting a little tangential, but the point here is that if you really want to, you can modify almost anything, but almost always the risk is on you, whether you like it (from a philosophical standpoint or otherwise) or not. I don't see what makes mobile phones so special that you should expect the manufacturer to provide you with the tools to modify them, especially when there are alternatives that allow it out of the box. No-one forces you to use an iPhone ;-)
> Well, in a sense that's an inherent risk of customizability, a tradeoff you have to make.
What? No, it's an inherent risk of customizability that requires violating the companies ToS to achieve.
You really are suggesting that the 'inherent risk' of any kind of customizability is about the same, regardless of whether the vendor intends to support it as a feature, or intends to _prohibit you_ from doing it and does everything they can to prevent it? Really?
Customizability is of the utmost importance if you want to adapt your device to your workflow. I prefer it to adapting my workflow to each device I use (and they are more than one).
But the important part is that a customizable environment works for both parties: those who support and those who oppose customization.
I am happy with the apple default. I would not be happy with the default android layout, and I have tried to be.
I don't spend my time changing my desktop items. I don't customise my chrome borders, fiddle with rainmeter, etc. I don't even change my desktop background from the first one I got years and years ago. This may not be a very "hacker" attitude, but for me I just want function by default.
Personalisation is never a bad thing, but having a worse default is. Not wanting to faff with your display to get something acceptable is entirely within reason. In each case it is a choice, and the ability to personalise your screen is very much a subjective benefit.
I'm totally with you on this. On both my iPhone and Macbook I don't change the desktop background or much else from the day I get it. There are other things like the terminal colors and such that I do but for the most part I leave the design alone. Now, customization is obviously very important to people and if it is then that's a great reason to switch to a platform other than iOS. But is it a reason that iOS is worse or better than some other platform? Absolutely not. There is room in this world for things to just be different rather than better or worse.
I Just changed to Android yesterday. The first thing I missed was the polish of the iOS.
I looked up how to switch applications and all I got was "10 best task switcher apps." I don't have time to evaluate three, much less ten task switcher apps! All I've been able to find is if you hold down the main button and then scroll to task manager, you can get to one.
I like customization, but Apple's defaults were better for me, at least. You say Fisher-Price, I say well conceived and 1960's Braun.
sorry, missing from my comment (lost in a pre-edit, it seems) was that it looks Fisher-Price to me. I know that plenty of people don't see it that way. Even if nothing else, the big chunky soft buttons seem to jar quite strongly against the thin, sleek, hi-tech look of the hardware to me - while the software and hardware might separately tell their own stories well, to me they don't seem to jive well together.
Newer Android releases have a dedicated onscreen button for this, while older releases have a press and hold on the home button menu with the 6 most recent applications.
Good grief, you speak of personlisation like it's a bug and not a feature. I personally hate the iOS window-dressing. You have this sleek-looking bit of hardware, but the OS looks plastic and Fisher-Price, with safe and chunky buttons to give to your kid with no sharp edges. The way you speak, it sounds like you would deny me my preference for something different because you think it's ugly. What about those who don't think the default skins look good? Why isn't it a good feature that we can customise the way things look?
I really don't understand the Apple-spawned fanboy cult that considers personalisation to be a bad thing - especially since they once had a successful marketing campaign based around personalising your hardware with the coloured macs.