The past decade, we've seen what was once just Apple's domain become mainstream, that is, bringing high-end UX design to software. But I can't help but feel some of the finesse has been lost. Gripes about iOS and OS X suggest the same is true for Apple as well.

You hear a lot about "first time user experience" for example. But it's not about wrapping up your product like a present. It's about creating a connection of trust through empowerment and a little bit of emotional appeal: "This is for you, you can do amazing things with this." And that means "first-time" shouldn't refer to the first time you turn on the device, but the first time you use a device for a particular purpose and context. Travelling to Another Country should definitely be treated as a "first time" experience, same with How Do I Work This Camera, I Don't Have an App For This, I Don't Have Data Right Now, I Dropped It Down The Stairs, I Should've Cached This Map But I Didn't, My Friend Has a Windows Phone, etc. Throwing in more obnoxious tutorials is not the answer, creating affordance is.

One of the most brilliant things Apple did for the iPhone was to make screenshots easy. People could show what they were doing with it, it empowered them to do so, popping up in articles and feeds. It took until Android 4 before you could do that without a USB debugger, so the only screenshots we got were taken by developers. Which platform has which image today? The iPhone isn't actually that intuitive, but most people already knew all about swiping and pinching by the time they picked one up for the first time. But the Android experience cannot come into its own when it's only chasing the walled gardens that already exist. It lacks agency for the user and pretends the cloud can pick up the slack.

The most annoying part is, the worst bugs are well known, and the war over services is obvious. The issue tracker has long been full of reports and me-too-s and dear-god-when-will-this-be-fixed. Owning an Android means you accept having something that's always a bit broken, which doesn't integrate as well with anything you do as an iPhone does with its family, and just substitutes Google for Apple more and more. I'll stay on this side, I like my phone to be hackable, but that means being able to shut off the stupid warnings too, and having an OS actually worth hacking for.

If the insides of this phone were as thoughtfully put together as the outside, Android could be to mobile what OS X was to the desktop in the 2000s. But so far, no dice.

Above all, it's true what Steve Jobs said: Android is a stolen product. After so many years, there is little about the platform that can be said to set it apart from direct competitors. It's now just a mostly well done version of the same thing. I'm one of those old fogeys who has resisted getting a tablet, simply because I don't want a gianter phone. I want a touch computer, with everything that implies, not just something to do email and watch movies on.

Quotes from: Android – Design Principles, Google Inc. (cc)