This is topic that everybody gets worked up about, whether it be Fandroids or Apple fanboys, however we finally have a pretty definitive answer with evidence. iOS’s superiority in terms of app appearance is down to several factors including fragmentation and developer support, an investigation by Wired reveals.
The first issue with Android, fragmentation, causes all sorts of problems for developers. Because there are so many different devices to adapt you app to, it’s much more difficult, and therefore compromises must be taken. From screen size to shape, from different processors to different resolution, it’s almost impossible. As Karma app co-founder says, ‘our need to be testing out something like 20 different phones and that definitely makes development slower.’
Then you have images, which because of the hardware is difficult to get right. As Wired writes:
For images, Hipmunk generates its Android assets at three resolutions: 1x for older devices, 2x for high-resolution devices, and an awkward 1.5x resolution for other devices — a necessity to avoid “weird artifacting,” . But some developers may skip this high level of support for outlier devices, leading to blurry, jaggy visuals for an unlucky few
Finally, you have developer support, something that Google has been notorious for not supplying, even though they are admittedly getting better.
“iOS definitely makes transitions a lot easier. Whether it’s U.I. elements fading in and out, or sliding, those things can be used and you have a good sense that it’ll consistently look good across iOS devices. On Android, there are different frameworks, but the problem is you dont know what’s consistently going to work across devices.”, Linden says.
While the developer documentation (or lack thereof) is now being clarified and added to with Ice Cream sandwich, it doesn’t help the other problems which come with the nature of the OS. It’s open source, and therefore has less consistency, even though the former does mean that there are fewer app guidelines and restrictions – something which Apple is often criticized for.
