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superchunk on 28 March 2012
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famousringo said:


Just a small correction, many iOS apps are packaged with both an iPad and iPhone UI. They're called universal apps, and they've been a development option since the iPad was introduced.

Many developers do choose to publish distinct iPad and iPhone apps, but they generally do it for the money, not due to any technical limitation. Either they feel that if you're using an app on two devices you should buy it twice, or they feel they should get paid for the non-trivial task of redesigning the UI, or they just want to take advantage of the generally higher ASP of apps for iPad while remaining competitive in the iPhone software market.

But you're right, designing two UIs is a much simpler task than trying to support all the diverse screens of Android devices. Do you have any screenshot examples of an app built before and after 4.0 and how the UI actually changes? I'm curious.

Thanks for the info on iOS. Not owning one often leads to 2nd hand information being gathered.

ICS is still very new and only legitimately on one phone and I think two tablets, however, all of the Google related applications have undergone big facelifts to take ICS into account. In every case its simply a better utilization of the bigger space. So with Gmail, on a phone it shows something like this in ICS:

On a tablet with the older Gingerbread (Honeycomb was only on tablets and it started the transition) it looked very much the same to this above layout with tons of wasted space. Notice you can only see one label at a time and must use multiple clicks to get to other items etc.

Now in ICS the exact same app is deployed, but it can dynamically choose its view to be more space friendly like this:

Far better utilization with quick access to full labels, all emails, and editing based on a more tabbed type approach.

Other apps will do the same. Twitter on Android tablets is horrible while its iPad cousin is very well layed out, almost identical to a regular desktop browser version. I suspect that within the next few months we'll see upgrades to all Android apps to utilize ICS APKs better so Android tablets will begin to provide a user experience already common on the iPad.

That's really been the deciding factor for most people. You go into a store and play with the iPad and the biggest or most widely used apps simply look FAR better as they were actually redesigned for the 10" screen. Where as Android had Gingerbread out first which was never meant to be on a phone, then Honeycomb that was a branched version of the OS and required wholly different apps, and now finally a true bridge OS that is one and the same between the two environments.

This just shows how much Google was taken off guard by Apple and its iPad. They clearly missed the transition and up until this year, have had to play catch up on the OS side. Now ICS easily matches and beats anything iOS offers for phone/tablet crossover and simplicity. Just have to wait for the devs to utilize it and that will take the better part of this year probably. But with Kindle having a ICS backbone now and its popularity along with the rumored Nexus style tablet launching at a sub-$200 price point... it will rapidly move forward.