Re:Pre-sales of ‘disappointing’ iPhone 4S fail to disappoint
by mattmanser on Sunday October 09, 2011 @11:22AM
(#3090588)
It's not disingenuous, they seriously did lift so much from iOS. Go and find any pre-iPhone phone. Then try and find one that's got an OS more similar to Android than Android is to iOS.
There are admittedly plenty of operations that touch phones have that can't be done any other way, but silly things like sliding left/right as iOS does is a perfect example. WP7 slides up/down. The reason it slides left/right is because Google copied the widget layout.
If you didn't know, this is what Android looked like before they copied iOS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg
Doesn't look like Android at all does it? Then 1 year later, ta-da!
This is sort of blowing my mind. After the release of the iPhone, Android shifted from a trackball-based design to a touch-based design (which is a big shift), and copied the Apple homescreen for its app drawer layout, but to call it a "slavish copy" is disingenuous. Android diverges - and innovates - in a lot of very significant ways. Google has been offering voice search/commands/voice-to-text for Android long before Siri. It did notifications and task switching far better than iOS did (and iOS has now "slavishly" copied those concepts). The back button and activity stack make the device usage behaviors ridiculously different from iOS usage. It's been doing wireless sync and cloud-based stuff for a long while; Apple's just now starting to integrate that stuff.
iOS has better-looking stock art assets/widgets, and the application approval process guarantees an adherence to Apple's UI design policies, which does help produce a more consistent experience for the things that Apple cares about, but to me personally, iOS feels like a toy next to Android. As non-fanboyishly as I can say it, I genuinely believe Android is better software than iOS. Apple has the vertical integration down better, no doubt, and their marketing is about a thousand times better than anything that any of the Android handset makers are doing, but I don't think you can use both OSes and seriously dismiss Android as a cheap carbon copy.