Yes, but we're talking very small screens here, with very little room for design. When you can design any application to run at 800x600, then maybe you don't fill every screen but you have enough space to do what you want. When you're dealing with very small screens, some of which are multitouch and some of which aren't, some of which have physical keyboards and some of which don't, then you have to juggle a lot of variables and the quality of your design suffers.
I shouldn't have to point out the level of build in the iPhone apps gallery. Those applications are gorgeous. Better than most PC apps, I'd argue, in their compactness and elegance. Developers have an edge on the iPhone because there's an established design standard, and there's an established screen size. So they can spend as long as they need fiddling to make their app perfect within those confines. On Android, that's not possible.
To use an unnecessary metaphor, iPhone apps are haiku and Android apps are open verse. On the one hand, it's nice not to have limits, but on the other, you find it's much easier to make something beautiful when you're given set restraints with which to riff on.
The point is not to try and out-Apple Apple - iPhone will probably always be prettier. The point is to be 'good enough' while offering the flexibility, variety and freedom that Apple don't give you.
I guess that's what makes it hard for me to comment on this. I don't really care much for flexibility or variety or freedom. I want something to work as well as it possibly can, and don't worry about tweaking it unless the tweaks make it run better. So Android doesn't interest me at all.
In a sense all software usage is just a series of tweaks. Otherwise you'd just have a big button to push and it would 'do stuff'. If that 'stuff' just happened to be exactly what you wanted then that would be fantastic. But that isn't reality. Reality is sometimes messy and complex so sometimes you need the ability to tweak things deal with the messy and complex problems from the real world.
Which is why I love my Mac so much. Most of what I need it does without my worrying about. At the same time, I can rip it up and change anything I'd like to if I want, and there are communities to help me get it changed. When I do need a tweak, it rarely takes me long at all.
> I don't really care much for flexibility or variety or freedom
Phones definitely fall into the sphere of things I like to hack on. That's definitely the crux of the difference of opinions. I would agree with you when talking about, say, cars, but a computing device that I physically own is something I want access to.
I shouldn't have to point out the level of build in the iPhone apps gallery. Those applications are gorgeous. Better than most PC apps, I'd argue, in their compactness and elegance. Developers have an edge on the iPhone because there's an established design standard, and there's an established screen size. So they can spend as long as they need fiddling to make their app perfect within those confines. On Android, that's not possible.
To use an unnecessary metaphor, iPhone apps are haiku and Android apps are open verse. On the one hand, it's nice not to have limits, but on the other, you find it's much easier to make something beautiful when you're given set restraints with which to riff on.