But then you use the app a bit more and it just doesn’t feel right. Why? It is graphically beautiful, probably one of the most beautiful apps I’ve seen on Android but it just isn’t Android app all the way through.

Let’s go through the issues in the app one-by-one and see how they could be fixed.

Ok, this is an easy one. Why does the app show the legacy menu button? It doesn’t even do anything!

Fix: Talk to your devs. They need to fix their manifest file and target SDK! This looks more like a bug than design problem to me. Let’s forgive this one.

The app uses iOS icons and icon style.

Fix: Don’t do this. There’s commonly used icons for settings and especially for sharing. Use them!

The app’s navigation drawer is simply wrong. It mixes up too many different things. I can see the push for other Yahoo! apps an important business goal but putting especially putting the “More Apps” link into the navigation drawer just doesn’t work. It also uses an iOS style “hamburger” icon for the drawer and the drawer interaction is off. In fact, using the drawer makes me wonder if this app is native or using a 3rd party framework.

The drawer is also extremely ugly. The otherwise beautiful app is badly damaged by this design.

The settings screens don’t feel like an Android app at all. There’s absolutely no reason why these screens need to be this heavily customised. Your users are using many, many Android apps that use the default settings controls and this app should use them too. Settings screens don’t need to be branded!

The problems with the settings don’t stop with just the look. The UI components used in these screens behave wrong and the interaction model is wrong. On Android you don’t need a “Done” button on these screens. Users use back button when they’re done. Other massive problem is the hit areas of these components. The radio buttons on the notification settings screen react only yo taps on the actual buttons and not the labels. The checkbox on the settings screen doesn’t have a down state.