Apple IOS vs. Lollipop

Apple IOS vs. Lollipop

For Apple the hard work was done last year with iOS 7. Out went Steve Jobs’ beloved skeuomorphism and in came minimalist flat design. It wasn’t met with universal praise and it certainly became more cartoonish, but iOS 7 was clean, modern and established Apple’s new design language.

iOS 8 builds on this good work adding more consistency and refining iconography, but it also has some smart design tweaks with regards to notifications, widgets, multi-tasking and keyboard interaction which I’ll go into in more detail in the Features section on the next page.

In addition to this iOS 8 makes better use of gestures for navigation: most notably a swipe from the left edge to go back and a double tap of the home button for ‘Reachability’ which slides the whole screen down. These are smart moves given the jump in screen size with both the iPhone 6 and, in particular, the iPhone 6.As the name suggests, Material Design is more about physicality than superficiality. It has specific physical rules about how buttons should react when touched, how different UI layers should interact and how animations are both trigger and unfold and this is being pushed on third party app developers as well.

The tables are turned when it comes to features. While Lollipop is all about refining existing functionality, iOS 8 takes major steps forward. It must be said that for the most part the two operating systems are still in the habit of ripping off the best aspects of one another, but this is no bad thing.

For example, iOS 8 now kills annoying pop-ups with more discreet notifications, the majority of which are also now actionable like in Android (for example, reply direct from a new message notification). It also supports Widgets like Android but only within the Notification Center and has song recognition built into voice searches like Google Voice Search.

The similarities continue with expanded sharing options so you can share content with any installed app again like Android, rather than the rather limited selection in iOS 7, and there is now support for swipe typing (made popular on Android) and third party keyboards, ditto.

Perhaps the most interesting is Lollipop’s approach to security. Where Apple uses TouchID, Android can now perform handset unlocking through automatic facial recognition while you check lockscreen notifications and it works seamlessly. It also pairs with Android Wear devices so the handset is never pin or password locked while both the handset and wearable are paired and therefore in close proximity. Clever stuff.