Google’s head of design, Matias Duarte, believes the iPhone user experience, which has always been dominated by a grid-system of app icons, is frustratingly stagnant. Duarte said this in an interview with Wired, in which he talked about a variety of design-oriented topics.
iPhone user interface monotonous
Apple’s iPhone user interface has not changed much since it was first introduced by Steve Jobs about eight years ago. Though at that time it was believed to be five years ahead of the competition, within a few years, Android was able to deliver a comparable user experience. Duarte indicated the same thing, saying that initially the iPhone interface was a positive development, but since then it has been more or less stagnant.
“[The iPhone] crystallised a lot of other things that were kind of stayed even by that point,” the Google executive said, adding, “like the rows of icons, which don’t scale very well. This idea of a tiny grid that you manually curate starts to feel very heavy and burdensome.”
Though Duarte gave no alternative to this, he did explain why he is very excited with the present technology. He said that phones “are starting to show their age,” suggesting that bigger shifts in mobile design are yet to come.
Google has a new Android plan to outwit Oracle
In other Google-related news, the Internet firm has come up with a new plan for Android in its battle against Oracle. The tech firms have been waging a legal war for years now that could have a major impact on the software industry. However, now Google has come up with a smart move suggesting it may either be preparing for a worst-case scenario or is simply working to outsmart Oracle.
The company has decided to take out the parts from Android that are disputed by Oracle and instead shift to an open source option. Even though this option will also be controlled by Oracle, Google is legally allowed to use it.
“In our upcoming release of Android, we plan to move Android’s Java language libraries to an OpenJDK-based approach, creating a common code base for developers to build apps and services,” the Internet firm told VentureBeat.
The dispute is related to the use of part of a programming language called Java, which belongs to Oracle. The tech firm claims that Google illegally copied part of Java and used it in Android.
