You are going to see this article make the rounds today and last night. The imagery is telling, indeed the examples that he pulled the iPhone version looks better than its Android counter part. A lot is going to be said about how this tells of better developers on iPhone, or people caring about the iPhone more, or Apple’s development platform being better suited to design… it’s all crap. Sure parts and pieces may be true, and I am no defender of Android, but truthfully stuff looks different on different platforms.

The same app on Windows looks different than it does on the Mac ((Exception to Safari and iTunes, even though they are a little different, they are very similar.)) developers do this so that the UI matches the native UI. Safari on Windows doesn’t look very much like Windows — this can be both good and bad, but it is the reason things are made like this. Can you imagine how pissed a diehard Android user would be if the Facebook app was a direct port of the iPhone version?

[Updated: 4.8.11 at 7:09 AM]

Let me clarify what I am saying here. I am not saying that Android is pretty, or that these apps are ugly. I am simply saying that they are designed this way for a reason. Please also remember there are some hideous iPhone apps out there too and there are some nice looking Android apps. On a whole, yes iPhone apps generally look better, but that doesn’t mean that Android apps *can’t* look better.