Designing views in the Android SDK is one of the areas that I can say without equivocation is worse than the iPhone in every single respect. Android’s approach to creating views has absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever. Designing your interface on the iPhone is easy. It’s fun. It’s intuitive. On Android, it’s fucking hell. It’s like working with the evil offspring of GridBagLayout and XML. It’s utterly horrid. But, Java has never done UI well and has never made it particularly fun so I can’t say I was surprised by this, though it did exceed my expectations by being even worse than I thought humanly possible. The whole process is counter-intuitive and time-consuming, and that’s just to make something that functions. It’s even more time-consuming and painful to make a UI that doesn’t look like ass.

Jeff, I so understand you. And the experience you describe transforms 1:1 to the interfaces you can see on Android today. Most of them just suck. This may change over time (i’m sure it will!) but Google has no particularly good history of interface design.

Read the full article here.

Related posts:

1. Version Adoption Rate: iPhone vs Android
2. Going Android for two Weeks