Why is the Android app so different from the iOS app?

Discussions General
1

Recently switched to Android and the app feels like a big downgrade compared to the iOS app.

“About”, “Actors” and “Comments” are split into tabs rather than being all one 1 page in collapsible lists

Collections, lists, comments etc are awkwardly placed at the bottom.

And the biggest difference, there are no widgets. None whatsoever. The lock screen widget on iOS was my favourite feature of the app.

2

I do agree the iOS app looks so much cleaner

1 Like
3

Go back to iOS!!!

1 Like
4

I would love to see a common codebase and design for both apps but I do understand that Android and iOS apps usually have a different design philosophy and completely remaking apps to have a common basis can be a ton of work…

5

I’m not a full time App developer (I and 99% Web developer), but building apps that look and functions pretty much the same on both platforms (usually called cross-platform) isn’t that hard at all. Two framework options that are most popular are:

  1. React Native (my very least favorite) that uses JavaScript
  2. Flutter (the best option) that uses Dart. I’ve personally built two app (small ones) that use Flutter and with both of them I wrote one single code base and deployed them for both iOS and Android without having to do anything specific.
1 Like
6

There’s a few answers to this depending on different things.

I believe some of the original design differences, such as in the Movie/Show Summary page, were made to follow with some Android-specific patterns at the time, whereas most of the other parts of the UI were closer to what iOS was recently (maybe 6 months ago? I’m not 100% sure of the timeframe). I could be wrong (I’m not a daily Android user) but I think at least more recently most platforms have a more consistent UI across platforms.

The main reason the Android app is otherwise ‘behind’ right now (eg. some main screens not aligned with iOS, no widgets) is more due to resources/experience, and while there are some frameworks to bridge the differences, they can also bring their own overhead and headaches for large projects, especially with less experience with those frameworks. Trying to use those now would probably be the worst option from the end user POV unless I could clone myself a few times to speed it up :laughing:, but that would help on the current side of things either way.

We’re working to get the clients more aligned, but I’m not sure when that’ll be just yet.

I’d suggest trying out Lite (browser or PWA) and let us know if there’s anything major missing in your use cases (obviously that doesn’t solve the no widgets part) because that’s probably closer to what iOS is at the moment.

1 Like