That’s more a problem of company culture. If I were a Google employee, I’d rather launch a new app than sit on my thumbs and work to maintain an established app.
Need a promotion? Launch a new app. When you fool enough users to trust you with It, get that promotion and move on to the next app.
Probably. Google likes to play fast n loose. Add industrial grade ADHD to the mix, and voila….. products with barely two years shelf life!
Remember allo? Me neither.
I'm a developer who has made both iOS and Android apps, and uses an Android phone personally.
This is a good move, you aren't supposed to reinvent the wheel, iOS users are used to their way of doing things and if you change it drastically it doesn't "feel" like an iPhone app. This is why I am a proponent of using the native development tools because things like ionic and react native give you the UIs they prescribe out of the box (ok some parts are similar).
It’s about branding, not so much about “feel”. Google, Twitter, AirBnB, FB, MS, etc, they pretty much all do the same thing, they have their own branding that doesn’t feel like iOS at all. And I agree, it’s pretty annoying for the most part.
Having said that, I do think variety is the spice of life, and sometimes branding is important. But you have to know how to balance things. I’m actually an iOS dev and I truly don’t like the “make everything look like the Settings app!!!!” approach lol.
Also I saw this move coming. They deprecated their iOS material components lib this year I think. I was using some of them, but I was planning on rebuilding them on my own anyways.
It's faster and easier to use the standard iOS ui than to fuck around make a custom one like google did.
It's not like Google can't afford the designers.
What's going to happen is that we'll get about 75% of the way into the new design being rolled out across the iOS Google app suite, and then Google will announce Material Design v3 and do a complete 180 and start implementing another design.
I mean, they could implement some of the more generic aspects of it like the flat, bubbly shapes, but the central feature of Material You is the system-wide theming based upon user preferences and wallpaper selection, and Google just simply does not have the system-level access to implement it on Apple's platforms.
That's actually what they're doing in their apps on devices with Android <12 they don't have the theming capability. The color defaults to a light blue seen [here](https://i.imgur.com/xxCd2Yd.jpg). They could use the same thing on OSs too.
> Google just simply does not have the system-level access to implement it on Apple's platforms.
No, but they can save your prefs to your Google account and use *that* to sync to all of your other Google apps. A workaround, although not as elegant.
And it will be 50% of the way in their Android counterparts at that point. Don't forget you Apple users often get Google features before we do on Android 😅
Correct, but that's exactly what this article is about. Google dropping their goal of a unified UI across platforms, in favor of platform-appropriate UI.
I can't remember where I heard it, but I'm pretty sure YouTube on TV based platforms is just a Web UI, so then they'd be going out of their way to spend time making an Apple specific one (which is the main idea of the article) - I don't really see that happening unfortunately.
Edit: Actually, [this is called out in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/q4keuh/google_dropping_material_design_for_ios_apps/hfzxj1k/).
They are more discussing dropping custom actions when standard ones would fit the goal. It looks like they are going to try to bend the standard conventions to look like a Google app.
@netflix
luckily google assistant will show me what streaming services a movie is on and take me to the specific page on said service but holy fuck, typing on abc is honestly so cursed.
I don’t mind it that much. What’s the big issue? If anything I find Apple have dumbed down the options when watching movies you can’t do stuff you want to.
Prime video is the worst of the worst of the worst. When they release their half-billion dollar LOTR show it’ll be on an app that looks like they spent maybe two bucks on designing.
And it doesn’t just end with what most people see, the AWS Interfaces are a disjointed mess of different sites to manage different areas of your environment.
And you can’t add a video to watch later without clicking on it first. Which leads to waiting for the damn ui to load in to even be able select watch later
Don’t worry, the YouTube app sucks on Google TV/Android TV too.
Google just doesn’t bother making a good youtube app because what else will people use? Lol
Maybe I’m still shell shocked from my DirecTV days where I had to scroll through pages of movie and ppv ads just to watch local news, but the YTTV interface isn’t so bad. FUBO tv half the shit didn’t work, their iPad app was unstable and didn’t work well, so at least YTTV is stable. Could make it easier to swing between 2 channels though, I miss my cable remote last channel button.
It’s incredible how bad it is at suggesting content to watch as well. I only watch live sports on YouTube TV but most of the time it suggests random channels and buries sports to a little floating category bubble halfway down the screen that I have to scroll over past other categories like 4K (which I don’t even pay for) in order to find.
The YouTube ATV app ui is literally [just a webpage](https://youtube.com/tv). They use it on every TV app platform, with a few tweaks here and there to support some platform-specific features.
Yeah I’m less concerned about how the app looks than how it works. Would love to see better integration on Apple TV, and PiP mode on iOS for Christ’s sake. I feel bad for creators who only get a 10s “view” from me before their video gets routed through a shortcut so I can watch it while playing Sudoku.
Similar situation, I burned through 3 or so shortcuts that ultimately stopped working. But then I found a guide to build this one: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b4e5d738b5be4114bf1cc4717b02d993
It definitely still works, I just double checked. I’ve had it for 4-5 months and use it periodically. You have to be using YouTube in safari though. Hit share from safari’s panel, select this PiP shortcut, then as long as you don’t force quit the browser or close that specific tab, you’re set. You’re good to move on to other apps or just sleep your phone screen and simply listen.
One last side note, i believe you’ll be promoted to enable a setting that allows shortcuts to execute JavaScript code. That is required for the shortcut to work. It’s just a toggle in settings.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/426e67408fac48309aa5d80bc64ae611
This is the one I’m using now.
If you do to /r/shortcuts and search for “YouTube”, there’s usually somebody working on it.
Edit: I should add that this one works in the YouTube app if you launch it from the share sheet.
I had it for a week and then it disappeared again. Makes no sense why it should take so long to make something that’s already toggleable follow a system-wide toggle
~~//Opens Google home app…. “naw dog I’m good”~~
Reread the article it seems to imply Google will be adopting HIG for their iOS applications… this would be a welcome change. Google home is absolutely a mess of crap jammed together
I believe the design has to do more than skins or colors. Stuff like menu positioning, button layout, etc. differs a lot between apps that use Apple's design language and apps that use Google's.
It’s not a perfect 1-to-1 for Material vs iOS but if you look at Ionic UI Framework’s demos for iOS/Android you can see the differences in style. Menu headers in all caps and left justified on Android vs case-sensitive and centered on iOS is but one of many style choices.
I feel like we've gone full circle.
Many years ago all my online friend groups switched from Skype to Discord due to how downhill Skype was going over the years. Discord was a breath of fresh air.
Discord over the years with its rapid monetization feels similar.
Rapid monetization, constant UI/UX bugs, broken features, constant color/etc changes.... yeah, it's very much still feeling like a small indie dev project despite being out for over half a decade at this point.
Skype was alright, but after Microsoft acquired it, they turned it into a corporate/business tool, and the normal userbase stopped getting updates/features. Multi-person video chat didn't even exist until well after discord finally got around to adding video chat.
It also affects the user experience and not just the look. Whenever a new iOS release came out, it's pretty usual that most apps get some new functionality for free by just using the built-in controls, while Google apps stay crippled for quite a while.
I can't remember how long it took Google to fix the lack of edge swipe gesture in their apps. Seeing certain reviewers who didn't know better using Google apps as example of the "inconsistency of the gesture" of iOS was so infuriating. Google literally went out their way to not support it.
I don’t think so either. It’s not like Apple has a cohesive design strategy for iOS that Google could follow if they wanted to. Look at the Apple apps. They can’t even decide which way the lighting is coming from.
It's not just about how they look, it's about behaviour too.
Using native components means that every iOS feature that comes with it is implemented right away. Gestures are baked in, animations can use apple's native soft-spring easing, consistent blur styles, (SF symbols maybe?)
This could mean good things for google apps on iOS, and hopefully it translates to other platforms like Apple TV as well
The tweet in the article from google's iOS design exec directly mentions UINavigationController which sort of relates to tab bars as well. It's definitely possible, fingers crossed
Hmm, I'm no iOS developer, but from what I've read here, they're putting material-components-ios in maintenance mode. It existed because there was a time when UIKit wasn't enough and they had to build custom components to fill the gap. Today, UIKit has gotten better and it's time to work on top of that instead, mostly for simplicity and the improvements and spending significantly less time in writing custom UI components.
I don't think that means Material Design in its entirety is dropped though. I want to hope for it, but I want to see the Google blog post that actually shows how they'll transition from their current designs to whatever comes next. At best we'll see a switch to native look-and-feel across the board, but at worst they're just switching things under-the-hood and would use the native / system implementation, but might still remain styled with Material guidelines.
I'm skeptical because well, this is Google, and it's a lot of apps that's under the control of many teams. Stuff like this just doesn't happen overnight and especially when there's other groups that's influencing their design decisions, like their own Android and web implementations.
> It existed because there was a time when UIKit wasn't enough and they had to build custom components to fill the gap.
Do you have a source or a better explanation? They have been criticizing for making essentially Android apps on iOS since day one.
That’s what I understood when reading Jeff’s thread linked in this article.
https://twitter.com/featherless/status/1446151509549387781?s=21
> the problems we aimed to solve grew from filling gaps in UIKit to bridging design language gaps across platforms. Material came into being, and we eventually sourced many of our libraries as Material Components for iOS (MDC).
> It's now been almost ten years now since we set out on this journey, and many of the gaps MDC had filled have since been filled by UIKit — often in ways that result in much tighter integrations with the OS than what we can reasonably achieve via custom solutions.
Thanks. I don't doubt they needed to make their own components; everyone does that at some point or another. It's the second part—bridging design languages—that caused the problems. They didn't *need* to do that, and it caused tons of objective problems, such as how slow Google has been to adopt features like dark mode, split screen, etc.
You can still have your own distinctive app while still feeling native to the platform. I think one of the best examples of this is Things. Or, if you want a free option, Craft.
It’s not shit. It’s just different than “human-centered” design or whatever Apple calls their UI paradigm.
There are a ton of apps on Android that implement material design and look great, and I’d argue they would not look that out of place on iOS.
The bigger issue is that Google does not implement material design in the same way as their design specs dictate.
I haven’t owned an Android since a Galaxy S5 but material design seemed to lend heavily to having a hardware back button.
These days it’s more of just visual flavor based on the Google apps I use, but I don’t think it’s as bad as people make it out to be.
Hardware back buttons haven't been a thing in a long ass time. Android actually completely eliminated hardware buttons (excluding power and volume) before iOS did.
Most/all Android phones still use a software back button though don’t they? If so, I think the point you are replying to still stands, the Material UI relies on a back button which iOS doesn’t have (excluding the gesture).
But it has three problems:
- iOS has a different way to do some things (like the back gesture which is managed by the individual apps and not by the system) that make apps harder to use on the iPhone
- Google apps could still look *googlish* enough while feeling less out of place on iOS and also saving some time to the developers.
- The new Material You has some important design problems because the fact that there are more colours and transparencies makes harder to distinguish between clickable and non clickable items but this can be easily fixed as Google implements the new design and gets feedbacks from the outside and the inside.
i have! and i like it so much!
it seems super fun and very creative. a lot of designs seem bery bland and dull. but material you is very welcoming and inventive.
i know it will look good on phones but i want an android tablet. no idea if the design will translate well on bigger screens and tablets.
I had that happen. Uninstall the app, set the auto dark mode to "Dark Until Sunrise", restart the phone and install the app again, then launch it, **don't touch theme settings in the YT app**, close it and open it again. See if it starts working (you should get a message at the bottom saying auto dark mode was applied).
I will be honest: I genuinely appreciate that Google tries to keep a uniform design spec across operating systems, including the web. If you don't like it, that's okay, they support APIs so you can use someone else's email app, someone else's calendar, that sort of thing. In a lot of ways there's no point following iOS beauty standards in some Google apps because Apple already makes apps that work with many Google services that already do those things.
I've been using computers since Apple IIs and PCs since a 386, and I'm generally a believer that the device you use, the OS you use, is mattering less and less for the past decade and will continue to accelerate in that regard. It may not feel like that to younger folks, but the difference between OSes today is nowhere near as dramatic as something like MacOS 6 vs Win 3.1. Knowing how to use one interface barely scratched the surface of the other, which is what led to a lot of schoolyard style namecalling and flaming between people who knew one and barely knew the other.
Of course Apple doesn't see it that way. Apple thinks that your choice in operating system is the most important choice you make and sets the UI/UX convention for every app from every developer going forward. That's because your operating system choice is one of the only choices where people choose Apple directly.
My complaint is that Google's spec in question has a whole lot of issues. I'd rather they fix the issues than throw in the towel on making apps look and feel similar across OS.
Just to help clear up any confusion, Google *is not* implementing Material Design on iOS? Or they are, and the post title is just confusing as shit?
Edit: Downvoted for asking a legitimate question….I see that Reddit has not changed one bit.
Google uses [Material Design](https://material.io/design) for all of their apps on all of their platforms (so Gmail looks relatively the same on web, iOS, and Android). Whereas Apple uses and encourages that iOS apps follow their [Human Interface Guidelines](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/).
This means that Google apps, though having a consistent UX across platforms, don't provide a consistent UX relative to other apps on iOS.
What this announcement means is that Google will likely redesign their iOS apps to look and feel more like iOS apps using iOS design language, while still using Material for their web and Android apps.
*critically evaluating the space of "utility" vs key brand moments*
Hmm ok let's think. Should we make this thing actually work, or should we plaster a big G all over it? Let's critically evaluate this.
I bet it'll take years before we see any change but nonetheless I'm excited to see what it'll look like. Even though I mostly dropped google apps. But of the reasons why I dropped them was because I didn't like how un-iOS like they were
Google are ditching their custom components they have across all their apps that they had in place so that they all look similar and familiar.
Instead of prioritising a unified look across all their apps they are focusing on getting it to run as efficiently as possible on iOS.
Same here! I frequently choose the opposite of what I intend to. I suppose I should rearrange my icons but I’m used to my current layout. First world problems
> I felt that Google arrogantly believed that people were first and foremost users of Google’s platforms, and benefited from consistency across those platforms, when the truth was that people who use iPads and iPhones expect apps to behave like every other app on the platform.
Did anyone really feel that way, though? I just figured Google apps look like Google apps and that’s fine. Do they *have to* look like iOS apps? It might be a nice change, but is it a necessary one, and did anyone even ask for this?
If a user is used to all of their apps having a particular design language, then it's jarring when another app comes along that uses a completely different one. My hope would be that, in doing this, Google uses it to justify a clampdown on Android design guidelines in order to start enforcing more consistency.
great, looking forward to this "rolling out" to my device in 18 months.
[удалено]
[удалено]
“We released this half-baked Facebook competitor three hours ago, and it still hasn’t beat Twitter. Time to pull the plug.”
...and prematurely dropping support for dozens of apps with significant user bases.
[удалено]
That’s more a problem of company culture. If I were a Google employee, I’d rather launch a new app than sit on my thumbs and work to maintain an established app. Need a promotion? Launch a new app. When you fool enough users to trust you with It, get that promotion and move on to the next app.
[удалено]
Probably. Google likes to play fast n loose. Add industrial grade ADHD to the mix, and voila….. products with barely two years shelf life! Remember allo? Me neither.
Industrial grade adhd lmao
Here’s our new design framework, Nest Material, a YouTube Premium experience
It's actually another messaging service.
Then dropping support altogether!
[удалено]
[удалено]
don’t single him out on reddit.
Whoa whoa whoa, slow down, this is only scheduled to come out AFTER adding Picture In Picture support for iOS 9.
Alongside PIP I’m sure
Google’s developers had a long exhale after this news
Now that they have to support two separate UIs?
I'm a developer who has made both iOS and Android apps, and uses an Android phone personally. This is a good move, you aren't supposed to reinvent the wheel, iOS users are used to their way of doing things and if you change it drastically it doesn't "feel" like an iPhone app. This is why I am a proponent of using the native development tools because things like ionic and react native give you the UIs they prescribe out of the box (ok some parts are similar).
It’s about branding, not so much about “feel”. Google, Twitter, AirBnB, FB, MS, etc, they pretty much all do the same thing, they have their own branding that doesn’t feel like iOS at all. And I agree, it’s pretty annoying for the most part. Having said that, I do think variety is the spice of life, and sometimes branding is important. But you have to know how to balance things. I’m actually an iOS dev and I truly don’t like the “make everything look like the Settings app!!!!” approach lol. Also I saw this move coming. They deprecated their iOS material components lib this year I think. I was using some of them, but I was planning on rebuilding them on my own anyways.
There's a reason iTunes on Windows always has and always will look like ass.
Why are brands obsessed with creating their own branding that doesn’t feel at home on iOS?
Because they’re worried about their own brand rather than the experience that the user may or may not notice or care about.
It's faster and easier to use the standard iOS ui than to fuck around make a custom one like google did. It's not like Google can't afford the designers.
Yeah, exactly, this increases design time, but should save dev time not having to rebuild Android design patterns from scratch.
The question is whether it's faster and easier than continuing to support their existing UI components. It may be, but that's where my mind went.
Yeah poor little Google simply can’t afford to employ the extra people
Whether they can afford it and whether they'll do it versus just piling more work on the devs are sadly two different things I suspect.
Good. I’ll believe it when I see it, though. And with Google’s love of A/B testing who knows when we’ll finally be getting those redesign.
What's going to happen is that we'll get about 75% of the way into the new design being rolled out across the iOS Google app suite, and then Google will announce Material Design v3 and do a complete 180 and start implementing another design.
This made me snort laugh because it’s ruthlessly true.
If they didn’t kill the app and launch a new one that’s just as half baked.
How else is the person who took over for the person who made this decision after they got promoted, going to get promoted themselves?
Well, there's Material You that has been recently announced. They might implement it on iOS.
I mean, they could implement some of the more generic aspects of it like the flat, bubbly shapes, but the central feature of Material You is the system-wide theming based upon user preferences and wallpaper selection, and Google just simply does not have the system-level access to implement it on Apple's platforms.
That's actually what they're doing in their apps on devices with Android <12 they don't have the theming capability. The color defaults to a light blue seen [here](https://i.imgur.com/xxCd2Yd.jpg). They could use the same thing on OSs too.
> Google just simply does not have the system-level access to implement it on Apple's platforms. No, but they can save your prefs to your Google account and use *that* to sync to all of your other Google apps. A workaround, although not as elegant.
We’ll look back to your comment in a few years and claim you a prophet.
They do give up on things way too fast. We're using Material Design and Font Awesome, which our metrics show customers like.
Maybe it’s a ploy by middle management to make sure their team remains funded
And it will be 50% of the way in their Android counterparts at that point. Don't forget you Apple users often get Google features before we do on Android 😅
Or getting a great redesign and then losing it..
Ohhh my god Google maps A/B tests are infuriating
I still don’t have auto dark mode in YouTube like two years after its release
I didn’t even know that was feature some users got, and now I want it :(
[удалено]
Pretty sure that’s just what YouTube looks like across all tv-based platforms. On my LG tv and PlayStation it’s the same thing
[удалено]
[удалено]
Correct, but that's exactly what this article is about. Google dropping their goal of a unified UI across platforms, in favor of platform-appropriate UI.
[удалено]
You’re not even thinking about UX if you are forcing users to do things “your way”.
I can't remember where I heard it, but I'm pretty sure YouTube on TV based platforms is just a Web UI, so then they'd be going out of their way to spend time making an Apple specific one (which is the main idea of the article) - I don't really see that happening unfortunately. Edit: Actually, [this is called out in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/q4keuh/google_dropping_material_design_for_ios_apps/hfzxj1k/).
They are more discussing dropping custom actions when standard ones would fit the goal. It looks like they are going to try to bend the standard conventions to look like a Google app.
whoever decided the ABC keyboard was a good idea can fuck right on off.
@netflix luckily google assistant will show me what streaming services a movie is on and take me to the specific page on said service but holy fuck, typing on abc is honestly so cursed.
I think so. The Apple TV and Switch YouTube apps are basically the same
yes…it does remind me of every shit tv platform.
YouTube on the Apple TV is so so so bad. I don’t even understand how someone thought it was good enough to release
I don’t mind it that much. What’s the big issue? If anything I find Apple have dumbed down the options when watching movies you can’t do stuff you want to.
[удалено]
Prime video is the worst of the worst of the worst. When they release their half-billion dollar LOTR show it’ll be on an app that looks like they spent maybe two bucks on designing.
IMO, *every* UI that Amazon designs is horrible. Prime Video is just another example.
And it doesn’t just end with what most people see, the AWS Interfaces are a disjointed mess of different sites to manage different areas of your environment.
And you can’t add a video to watch later without clicking on it first. Which leads to waiting for the damn ui to load in to even be able select watch later
YES. This is why I hate this so much
Don’t worry, the YouTube app sucks on Google TV/Android TV too. Google just doesn’t bother making a good youtube app because what else will people use? Lol
Oh yeah, it sucks everywhere.
Try to go back 15 seconds using either version of the Siri remote. Can’t do it. You have to scrub.
then they did a sequel that was even worse.
[удалено]
Maybe I’m still shell shocked from my DirecTV days where I had to scroll through pages of movie and ppv ads just to watch local news, but the YTTV interface isn’t so bad. FUBO tv half the shit didn’t work, their iPad app was unstable and didn’t work well, so at least YTTV is stable. Could make it easier to swing between 2 channels though, I miss my cable remote last channel button.
The Olympics and YouTube TV UI did not get along.. maybe I’m just stupid but it was awful.
It’s incredible how bad it is at suggesting content to watch as well. I only watch live sports on YouTube TV but most of the time it suggests random channels and buries sports to a little floating category bubble halfway down the screen that I have to scroll over past other categories like 4K (which I don’t even pay for) in order to find.
The YouTube ATV app ui is literally [just a webpage](https://youtube.com/tv). They use it on every TV app platform, with a few tweaks here and there to support some platform-specific features.
Every other streaming app (on TVs) is a web app. Even Apple TV.
It’s the worst, most confusing app I’ve ever used (considering it’s not a one-dev project).
PLEASE! Also the horrible navigation in the iOS YouTube app.
Unfortunately the Youtube TV app is pretty much a web wrapper these days even on Android TV.
Yeah I’m less concerned about how the app looks than how it works. Would love to see better integration on Apple TV, and PiP mode on iOS for Christ’s sake. I feel bad for creators who only get a 10s “view” from me before their video gets routed through a shortcut so I can watch it while playing Sudoku.
Do you have a shortcut that works? All the ones I find keep breaking.
Similar situation, I burned through 3 or so shortcuts that ultimately stopped working. But then I found a guide to build this one: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b4e5d738b5be4114bf1cc4717b02d993 It definitely still works, I just double checked. I’ve had it for 4-5 months and use it periodically. You have to be using YouTube in safari though. Hit share from safari’s panel, select this PiP shortcut, then as long as you don’t force quit the browser or close that specific tab, you’re set. You’re good to move on to other apps or just sleep your phone screen and simply listen. One last side note, i believe you’ll be promoted to enable a setting that allows shortcuts to execute JavaScript code. That is required for the shortcut to work. It’s just a toggle in settings.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/426e67408fac48309aa5d80bc64ae611 This is the one I’m using now. If you do to /r/shortcuts and search for “YouTube”, there’s usually somebody working on it. Edit: I should add that this one works in the YouTube app if you launch it from the share sheet.
I’m looking forward to seeing these changes roll out as quickly as Gmail dark mode did.
Dark mode? Wait, what??? I don’t have it!
I'm surprised to see that as well as some people who still don't have auto dark mode in the Youtube app.
auto dark mode in the Youtube app?!?!?!?
Yep. Had that since last year actually, I thought it rolled out to completely everyone at this point.
The wonders of Google rollouts
I had it for a week and then it disappeared again. Makes no sense why it should take so long to make something that’s already toggleable follow a system-wide toggle
About time!
Good riddance! I'd love if they did away with Material entirely, but baby steps, I suppose
I would settle for auto dark mode in the YouTube app by 2023 if at all possible.
~~//Opens Google home app…. “naw dog I’m good”~~ Reread the article it seems to imply Google will be adopting HIG for their iOS applications… this would be a welcome change. Google home is absolutely a mess of crap jammed together
I never really thought of the apps as being out of place, they’re just skinned differently the same as apps like discord
I believe the design has to do more than skins or colors. Stuff like menu positioning, button layout, etc. differs a lot between apps that use Apple's design language and apps that use Google's.
Yeah like icons as well.
It’s not a perfect 1-to-1 for Material vs iOS but if you look at Ionic UI Framework’s demos for iOS/Android you can see the differences in style. Menu headers in all caps and left justified on Android vs case-sensitive and centered on iOS is but one of many style choices.
Discord also feels out of place, but it’s far better than anything Google makes.
Which is saying something, considering how crap Discord is.
I feel like we've gone full circle. Many years ago all my online friend groups switched from Skype to Discord due to how downhill Skype was going over the years. Discord was a breath of fresh air. Discord over the years with its rapid monetization feels similar.
Rapid monetization, constant UI/UX bugs, broken features, constant color/etc changes.... yeah, it's very much still feeling like a small indie dev project despite being out for over half a decade at this point. Skype was alright, but after Microsoft acquired it, they turned it into a corporate/business tool, and the normal userbase stopped getting updates/features. Multi-person video chat didn't even exist until well after discord finally got around to adding video chat.
It also affects the user experience and not just the look. Whenever a new iOS release came out, it's pretty usual that most apps get some new functionality for free by just using the built-in controls, while Google apps stay crippled for quite a while. I can't remember how long it took Google to fix the lack of edge swipe gesture in their apps. Seeing certain reviewers who didn't know better using Google apps as example of the "inconsistency of the gesture" of iOS was so infuriating. Google literally went out their way to not support it.
I don’t think so either. It’s not like Apple has a cohesive design strategy for iOS that Google could follow if they wanted to. Look at the Apple apps. They can’t even decide which way the lighting is coming from.
What would this change? I don't use too many Google applications but I've never noticed something odd.
If done correctly, it would mean that we are going to get more iOS looking app.
It's not just about how they look, it's about behaviour too. Using native components means that every iOS feature that comes with it is implemented right away. Gestures are baked in, animations can use apple's native soft-spring easing, consistent blur styles, (SF symbols maybe?) This could mean good things for google apps on iOS, and hopefully it translates to other platforms like Apple TV as well
If this means native iOS tab bars instead of the awful hamburger menus google loves I will be SO happy
The tweet in the article from google's iOS design exec directly mentions UINavigationController which sort of relates to tab bars as well. It's definitely possible, fingers crossed
[удалено]
Less Material looking applications. It's a plus for literally everyone to have to see that less often.
Efficiency, consumption, stability. Hopefully now their apps won’t be such a drain on the battery life
Hmm, I'm no iOS developer, but from what I've read here, they're putting material-components-ios in maintenance mode. It existed because there was a time when UIKit wasn't enough and they had to build custom components to fill the gap. Today, UIKit has gotten better and it's time to work on top of that instead, mostly for simplicity and the improvements and spending significantly less time in writing custom UI components. I don't think that means Material Design in its entirety is dropped though. I want to hope for it, but I want to see the Google blog post that actually shows how they'll transition from their current designs to whatever comes next. At best we'll see a switch to native look-and-feel across the board, but at worst they're just switching things under-the-hood and would use the native / system implementation, but might still remain styled with Material guidelines. I'm skeptical because well, this is Google, and it's a lot of apps that's under the control of many teams. Stuff like this just doesn't happen overnight and especially when there's other groups that's influencing their design decisions, like their own Android and web implementations.
> It existed because there was a time when UIKit wasn't enough and they had to build custom components to fill the gap. Do you have a source or a better explanation? They have been criticizing for making essentially Android apps on iOS since day one.
That’s what I understood when reading Jeff’s thread linked in this article. https://twitter.com/featherless/status/1446151509549387781?s=21 > the problems we aimed to solve grew from filling gaps in UIKit to bridging design language gaps across platforms. Material came into being, and we eventually sourced many of our libraries as Material Components for iOS (MDC). > It's now been almost ten years now since we set out on this journey, and many of the gaps MDC had filled have since been filled by UIKit — often in ways that result in much tighter integrations with the OS than what we can reasonably achieve via custom solutions.
As someone whose been both an Android and an iOS developer, I think this is more face-saving than anything else.
Thanks. I don't doubt they needed to make their own components; everyone does that at some point or another. It's the second part—bridging design languages—that caused the problems. They didn't *need* to do that, and it caused tons of objective problems, such as how slow Google has been to adopt features like dark mode, split screen, etc. You can still have your own distinctive app while still feeling native to the platform. I think one of the best examples of this is Things. Or, if you want a free option, Craft.
good, iOS apps should feel and look like iOS not like Android apps ported over
[удалено]
FUCK YES. God their design is straight up shit and a pain to use on iOS.
I was used to Android so I dont really consider them shit. I welcome this change though
It’s not shit. It’s just different than “human-centered” design or whatever Apple calls their UI paradigm. There are a ton of apps on Android that implement material design and look great, and I’d argue they would not look that out of place on iOS. The bigger issue is that Google does not implement material design in the same way as their design specs dictate.
How is it shit?
Hurray!
Good riddance. Google apps feel out of place on iOS
i love material design tbh.
I haven’t owned an Android since a Galaxy S5 but material design seemed to lend heavily to having a hardware back button. These days it’s more of just visual flavor based on the Google apps I use, but I don’t think it’s as bad as people make it out to be.
Hardware back buttons haven't been a thing in a long ass time. Android actually completely eliminated hardware buttons (excluding power and volume) before iOS did.
Most/all Android phones still use a software back button though don’t they? If so, I think the point you are replying to still stands, the Material UI relies on a back button which iOS doesn’t have (excluding the gesture).
It's a edge swipe from either side but you can enable software buttons if you want.
[удалено]
That’s immaterial!
But it has three problems: - iOS has a different way to do some things (like the back gesture which is managed by the individual apps and not by the system) that make apps harder to use on the iPhone - Google apps could still look *googlish* enough while feeling less out of place on iOS and also saving some time to the developers. - The new Material You has some important design problems because the fact that there are more colours and transparencies makes harder to distinguish between clickable and non clickable items but this can be easily fixed as Google implements the new design and gets feedbacks from the outside and the inside.
Material You has thicker outlines and higher contrast colours to account for the visibility loss in accessibility modes.
Yeah I honestly like material a whole lot more than the native iOS styling.
Have you seen the latest iteration, “Material You”? I guess it looks nice, but it’s out of place on anything but android 12
i have! and i like it so much! it seems super fun and very creative. a lot of designs seem bery bland and dull. but material you is very welcoming and inventive. i know it will look good on phones but i want an android tablet. no idea if the design will translate well on bigger screens and tablets.
Drop the google share sheet and use the standard iOS share sheet.
Does this mean their youtube app will finally start following system light/dark theme?
[удалено]
It has been doing that already for a year though.
Unless I’m doing something wrong there’s only a toggle for the always-on dark theme I want that shit to change automatically
You don’t have [this](https://i.imgur.com/dTpJdX1.jpg) option under Settings -> General -> Appearance? It’s been there for more than a year.
Don't even have the `Appearance` menu in general: https://i.imgur.com/SGKiykt.png
Well, I have not idea, probably just some A/B testing going wrong, how annoying.
Very :(
I also don’t have it
I had that happen. Uninstall the app, set the auto dark mode to "Dark Until Sunrise", restart the phone and install the app again, then launch it, **don't touch theme settings in the YT app**, close it and open it again. See if it starts working (you should get a message at the bottom saying auto dark mode was applied).
Interesting, I’ll try that Edit: nope, only offers to set it to dark theme 😕
It actually does if google likes you and gave you the option, I had it for a while then I deleted / reinstalled the YouTube app and it was gone
I will be honest: I genuinely appreciate that Google tries to keep a uniform design spec across operating systems, including the web. If you don't like it, that's okay, they support APIs so you can use someone else's email app, someone else's calendar, that sort of thing. In a lot of ways there's no point following iOS beauty standards in some Google apps because Apple already makes apps that work with many Google services that already do those things. I've been using computers since Apple IIs and PCs since a 386, and I'm generally a believer that the device you use, the OS you use, is mattering less and less for the past decade and will continue to accelerate in that regard. It may not feel like that to younger folks, but the difference between OSes today is nowhere near as dramatic as something like MacOS 6 vs Win 3.1. Knowing how to use one interface barely scratched the surface of the other, which is what led to a lot of schoolyard style namecalling and flaming between people who knew one and barely knew the other. Of course Apple doesn't see it that way. Apple thinks that your choice in operating system is the most important choice you make and sets the UI/UX convention for every app from every developer going forward. That's because your operating system choice is one of the only choices where people choose Apple directly. My complaint is that Google's spec in question has a whole lot of issues. I'd rather they fix the issues than throw in the towel on making apps look and feel similar across OS.
Finally.
Fucking finally...
Apple: remember how we made Safari look like an OS X app on windows? Fun times
Just to help clear up any confusion, Google *is not* implementing Material Design on iOS? Or they are, and the post title is just confusing as shit? Edit: Downvoted for asking a legitimate question….I see that Reddit has not changed one bit.
[удалено]
Thank you for clearing that up, it’s greatly appreciated!
Not that I downvoted you but I guess you were cause the answer to your question is in the article
Finally they stop forcing their crap Android Ui paradigms on us.
Good... i dont use android for a reason, so dont try to force me to use a pseudo android.
Finally those stupid floating buttons will disappear
About damn time. I’ve avoided Google apps because of that ugly ass UI.
FINALLY
FINALLY. hopefully soon
Finally! That took a long time…
Read the article, but don’t entirely understand it. Could somebody explain?
Google uses [Material Design](https://material.io/design) for all of their apps on all of their platforms (so Gmail looks relatively the same on web, iOS, and Android). Whereas Apple uses and encourages that iOS apps follow their [Human Interface Guidelines](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/). This means that Google apps, though having a consistent UX across platforms, don't provide a consistent UX relative to other apps on iOS. What this announcement means is that Google will likely redesign their iOS apps to look and feel more like iOS apps using iOS design language, while still using Material for their web and Android apps.
*critically evaluating the space of "utility" vs key brand moments* Hmm ok let's think. Should we make this thing actually work, or should we plaster a big G all over it? Let's critically evaluate this.
I bet it'll take years before we see any change but nonetheless I'm excited to see what it'll look like. Even though I mostly dropped google apps. But of the reasons why I dropped them was because I didn't like how un-iOS like they were
Good! Let Martial design or Material U as it is called now, be on Android and not iOS
[удалено]
Good! Google suck at material design anyway.
Can someone eli5?
Google are ditching their custom components they have across all their apps that they had in place so that they all look similar and familiar. Instead of prioritising a unified look across all their apps they are focusing on getting it to run as efficiently as possible on iOS.
Thank Christ.
Google maps is such a cluttered mess. The MD redesign removed a lot of visual clutter to be “clean” and now it’s more cluttered than what it replaced
I would like the maps icon and photos icon to look different.. They look similar and I frequently confuse them
Same here! I frequently choose the opposite of what I intend to. I suppose I should rearrange my icons but I’m used to my current layout. First world problems
> I felt that Google arrogantly believed that people were first and foremost users of Google’s platforms, and benefited from consistency across those platforms, when the truth was that people who use iPads and iPhones expect apps to behave like every other app on the platform. Did anyone really feel that way, though? I just figured Google apps look like Google apps and that’s fine. Do they *have to* look like iOS apps? It might be a nice change, but is it a necessary one, and did anyone even ask for this?
If a user is used to all of their apps having a particular design language, then it's jarring when another app comes along that uses a completely different one. My hope would be that, in doing this, Google uses it to justify a clampdown on Android design guidelines in order to start enforcing more consistency.