Sometimes the truth of a thing isn’t in the think of it, but in the feel of it.
See, I’d rather not feel like someone is sucking me in with fun animations and “gotta have” UX yahoos and then turning around and doing sketchy things behind my back. The Chrome app is indeed iOS-caliber – for better and for worse.
This 70-year old tech world we live in is not mature enough to provide sustainable authentic emotional appeal. We’re still at the infantilization and rug-pulling stage of evolution. I’d rather my devices show me the world as it really is.
Can’t we have both ethical business behind the app and excellent UI/UX?
For example, Ivory. I haven’t used it myself but I used every single other app by Tapbots. They all were great. Tweetbot was an excellent app with animations, fluidity, and attention to details in both UI and UX. They don’t collect any user data in Ivory, too.
It’s fine if you like a different kind of UI/UX. But it’s not a useful heuristic to equate nice UI/UX with some sort of nefarious intent.
Thanks for the counter-example! I was not aware of it.
I’m not making some proof that you can’t have both, just the observation that there’s a trade-off here that OP doesn’t acknowledge. And if I have to choose, I know which side I’m going to pick.
Companies change over time. Just this morning we’ve heard how the once-beloved Heroku has fucked over its users. Open source, while certainly not perfect, provides a greater level of security than any brand.
We really need a sane and fully open/free smartphone solution. The Librem 5 is certainly not it (mine is sitting in a box somewhere, used only once). When I last looked at PostmarketOS (which is a while ago), it seemed unusable (not having a working touch screen or modem is a bit of a no go).
Can’t we have both ethical business behind the app and excellent UI/UX?
Uh yes? I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “ethical business”, but a current example might be Tapbots or iconfactory, but I’d point to Panic as being a quintessentially good business, from which I’ve never heard nor seen any kind of malicious or sketchy actions.
That was a question to the top commenter, who seemingly posited that slick UI and polished UX are somehow indicative of sketchy things going on behind their back. There are many examples to the contrary and not only on iOS/macOS.
turning around and doing sketchy things behind my back.
I dunno, Google and Android seem pretty sketchy to me. I’m not a huge fan of either locked down ecosystem, but at least the iThings don’t come shipped with a stock firmware that’s already spying extra hard on you out of the box.
Oh yes. Notice that I put Chrome in the same category. What I’m pushing back against is the dismissal of open source apps without any mention of their benefits.
No one - including Gruber in this post was dismissing open source on principle, what they were commenting on is the difference in basic quality of software in the two ecosystems.
The entire point of the post is that on android there simply is no equivalently polished mastodon client to any of the good iOS ones. Many of the open source ones are available on both platforms, but on iOS there are paid commercials apps that are more polished, and on android there is not.
Historically there was an argument that android users were less likely to actually pay for apps, or were more likely to has an out of date OS, but I those problems have been fixed at this point?
See, I’d rather not feel like someone is sucking me in with fun animations and “gotta have” UX yahoos
This is a common refrain among people who don’t understand good UI or UX, and to instead just slap a “fun animations” dismissal on anyone/thing that they don’t care about. It basically means you’re not making an argument in good faith.
and then turning around and doing sketchy things behind my back.
WTF does this have to do with anything? Plenty of apps do sketchy shit, and at least on iOS that’s ostensibly against the rules. It certainly has nothing do with making a polished product.
This 70-year old tech world we live in is not mature enough to provide sustainable authentic emotional appeal. We’re still at the infantilization and rug-pulling stage of evolution. I’d rather my devices show me the world as it really is.
And this is nonsense.
We know how to make good applications. We know how to make good user interfaces. Saying that doing that is “infantilization” is BS. The reason apps frequently have piss poor UI and UX is because it’s cheaper, not because you’re being shown “the world as it really is”.
Here’s the thing: you have decided that being well built, polished, etc is less important to you than cost, which is fine, though of course many people disagree. But you’ve also gone and dismissed polish as being irrelevant, made dismissive and plainly false claims that good UI/UX is “adding animations” or “yahoo UX”, further said those apps are doing sketchy shit, and finally claimed that an app with good UI/UX is inherently less good than whatever bad-UI app you’re using (we know it’s bad UI, you just said good UI is inherently bad and just animations). This behavior is pretty much exactly what Gruber is saying in this post: that you don’t understand what good UI/UX is (again: you said at the beginning that you interpret anyone talking about such to be talking about pointless animations), and consider people who do value it to be inferior to you.
You haven’t made a civil comment (is there an argument here in between the F bombs, the “nonsense”, the “BS”?), so I’ll respond once for any readers and then disengage. My faith seems pretty good to me.
I agree that we know how to make good (enough) interfaces. I think all the open source Mastodon apps mentioned in OP have totally fine interfaces. Wanting emotional appeal beyond that, the (yes, infantilizing) pixel-perfect response to gestures and whatnot, that requires paying people. Which requires revenues. Which requires the go-go pressures to grow-grow revenue. That’s where the sketchy shit comes from.
Plenty of companies comport themselves with integrity today, absolutely. But it is equally absolute that companies that don’t grow revenues enough get acquired by companies that do. And integrity dilutes with scale.
The only way sketchy shit will stop is when people become sophisticated enough to vote with their dollars and penalize companies in the open market for bad behavior. That is what I mean by “mature enough”. We don’t do that yet.
I observe that @olliej didn’t spend a single word on the value of open source the way I have on UX, both in this comment and, believe it or not, my original. The words “sustainable authentic” were carefully chosen. I think UX is important! Even the infantilizing UX! Who doesn’t like being pampered. But it comes at a cost, so there’s a trade-off. So again, I stand by my faith, I think it’s plenty good here.
You haven’t made a civil comment (is there an argument here in between the F bombs, the “nonsense”, the “BS”?), so I’ll respond once for any readers and then disengage. My faith seems pretty good to me.
Ok, I’ll try to be as clear and “civil” as possible. First up, the only f-bomb on the page is afaict in one of your comments? But let’s get to the point.
Your post started with
See, I’d rather not feel like someone is sucking me in with fun animations and “gotta have” UX yahoos and then turning around and doing sketchy things behind my back.
Which starts with a rhetorical device to dismiss any alternate opinions. People who want polished UI, etc don’t have different priorities from you, but rather “polished UI” is just gimmicks that have no relevance to anything, so the thing they’re prioritizing is intrinsically a non issue and should be ignored. You then go and say that developers who do create software with polished UI are inherently doing sketchy stuff.
I agree that we know how to make good (enough) interfaces.
Literally the point of the post is the difference between good and good enough.
I think all the open source Mastodon apps mentioned in OP have totally fine interfaces.
Which the article agrees with. It just says the iOS apps have better UI, which is again the point of the post
Wanting emotional appeal beyond that, the (yes, infantilizing) pixel-perfect response to gestures and whatnot,
I think Gruber harps on about “emotional appeal”, but he’s talking about apps that are well designed. That isn’t infantilizing unless you consider good UI and UX to be inherently infantilizing, which I don’t think you do based on other comments, but your statements here are saying that that is what is happening.
that requires paying people.
There are OSS projects I have used in the past that had good UI, even without funding. What it requires is people who are sufficiently interested in design to spend their spare time volunteering. My experience back in the day was that designers were looked down on by OSS coders, which I know pushed at least a few talented designers away from involvement in OSS, and I can’t imagine the folk I knew were the only ones who got pushed out.
But otherwise you have to pay UI designers, just like you would have to pay any other developers.
Which requires revenues. Which requires the go-go pressures to grow-grow revenue. That’s where the sketchy shit comes from.
No, it doesn’t. There are plenty of developers who charge for their products directly. You get sketchy stuff in free apps, because if something is free but costs money to make, then the “consumer” is in fact the product”.
Plenty of companies comport themselves with integrity today, absolutely. But it is equally absolute that companies that don’t grow revenues enough get acquired by companies that do. And integrity dilutes with scale.
Plenty of companies are small and self contained, and have gone for decades (Panic is more than 25 years old at this point). Unless your argument is that you cannot ever trust any commercial product, in which case you’re implicitly saying that no developer should earn anything.
I observe that @olliej didn’t spend a single word on the value of open source the way I have on UX, both in this comment and, believe it or not, my original.
Because the article isn’t about OSS vs commercial software, it’s about the degree of UI polish in android vs. iOS apps, in the context of mastodon clients. There are paid and unpaid on each platform, and Gruber is saying the best of the android clients are less polished than the best on iOS. I might have commented on the comparison between OSS and commercial software if that was what the article was about.
The words “sustainable authentic” were carefully chosen. I think UX is important! Even the infantilizing UX! Who doesn’t like being pampered. But it comes at a cost, so there’s a trade-off.
And again, you are being dismissive of people saying they prefer polished UI. Good or polished UI does not mean infantilizing, or “being pampered”. You prioritize UI below functionality, because you appear to believe they’re contradictory, but the people saying they value UI polish are not saying “over functionality” - we have access to a lot of software that says they’re not, and so given the choice pay for the better UI.
I continue to feel that your original post was not particularly made in good faith due to the opening dismissal of anyone having different priorities.
I don’t see it as “fun animations” as much as consistency of a decent user experience. I use both iOS and Android on a daily basis and see some of these issues. Android doesn’t even offer a consistent copy paste behavior. Sometimes it’s a long press, sometimes it’s a double tap, and it drives me nuts. I don’t think Android should copy iOS, but things could be so much better on Android. I guess as long as it’s good enough (cheap enough) to get the customers to give them all their data, Google will be happy with the status quo.
(yes, I understand you can run Android without Google services, but let’s be honest that this is extremely niche, cumbersome and exacerbates the problems of user experience)
Look around. How long has it taken our laws, construction, banking, plumbing infrastructure to get to where they are? Why would you expect software to be faster? It’s a fundamentally new medium, with whole new categories of failure modes.
Look around. How long has it taken our laws, construction, banking,
plumbing infrastructure to get to where they are?
A lot of computer technologists wear the rose-tinted sunglasses of
unquestioning neophilia. In essence, they’re too busy chasing the
latest new and shiny with no discernment of the good, and they can’t see
much farther than the shiny thing sitting under their noses at the
moment. And of course, the new thing is better than everything that
came before and will be better than everything that came after – until
a new new thing comes along to replace it.
I’m glad this was posted, because John Gruber has such different software values than I do. He seems to think of app development as being akin to making films (he even has a Kubrick quote), where meticulousness, look-and-feel, and polish matter much more than utility. He judges other pieces of software the way a filmmaker judges other films – he’s looking for artistry. But I view software as a utility first, and artwork second. And especially so for software running daily on my pocket computer (smartphone).
Meanwhile, many of my core software values don’t get a mention from him. Like the fact that there is way more open source software for Android than for iOS, and this goes down to every layer. Or, the fact that Android’s developer toolchain is entirely x-platform, allowing developers to tweak and modify software regardless of what desktop operating system they use.
I love Apple’s design values. When I have my design cap on, there’s a flow of admiration in the direction of macOS and iOS. And I even participate in the Apple ecosystem a little, with a Mac Mini & iPad. But my daily developer workstation is Linux, and my daily phone is Android. Thinkpad X1C and Pixel 7, because I do care about well-designed utility.
And both have f/oss software, programmability, and utility as their core values, aligned with mine. Thus, for me, and for many like me, that’s the show.
Now… when I’m recommending unfussy hardware/software for my non-techie friends & family? Sure, it’s the Macbook Air and iPhone, then. But I’m really glad a choice exists on the market for people like me, and I’m not sure what value there is in bashing the other side just because it doesn’t share your values.
The conclusion you don’t state, and perhaps don’t draw, is “the iphone apps that focus on look-and-feel are less functional than the android apps that don’t”. I certainly don’t draw that conclusion.
Look and feel matters for functionality. Those of you who haven’t read Jef Raskin’s book should read it, particularly chapters 2-4. One example: How many per cent of the touches/gestures hit and act on an item that wasn’t there yet when the user’s brain decided to act? This is easily measured with user testing, videos and questions, and one of the chief ways to reduce the number is to add slick little animations and transitions, so that touch targets don’t appear suddently, but rather slide in, grow, shrink in ways that the brain use.
Yes, I don’t draw that conclusion either. I think iOS and macOS apps are perfectly functional – and sometimes moreso than Android or Linux counterparts. But I don’t think John Gruber was treating good design as being in service of function. He was treating good design as a showcase of craft and artistry. (Perhaps even of commercial ambition, as he derides the Android Mastodon projects as “hobby projects”, while praising the iOS “commercial” ones.)
100% agree with you that Jef Raskin has some great thoughts on the utility of good design (many of which could benefit the f/oss world). There was some interesting work in this direction a few years back in the Linux desktop world by the (now defunct) non-profit Yorba.
Gruber is solidly from the background of Mac indie apps like Panic’s stuff, which place a premium on design and functionality but are also vehicles for sustaining small businesses.
That which we do is follow rules of thumb. We don’t reason from first principles, even when those first principles are important to us.
Our real goal is to build applications and services that serve the users well, which includes being low on frustration. Being low on errors and frustration is… being pleasant to use, which ends up being some rules of thumbs about animations and general slickness.
You may be interested in the work of Richard Sapper. He was the original designer of the first black Thinkpad 700c. He kind of embodies an alternative to the Deiter Rams school of design (which Apple follows closely) where every device is very solutions-oriented.
You could always just install the PWA as well and it’s fine—I mean I’m still using FOSS Tusky because it gives me all the functionality I need (while fixing my only issue with the web UI: there’s no way to change “favourite” to “favorite”). Too bad iOS can’t get PWA Push Notifications if you wanted to know about DMs lol.
See, I’d rather not feel like someone is sucking me in with fun animations and “gotta have” UX yahoos and then turning around and doing sketchy things behind my back. The Chrome app is indeed iOS-caliber – for better and for worse.
This 70-year old tech world we live in is not mature enough to provide sustainable authentic emotional appeal. We’re still at the infantilization and rug-pulling stage of evolution. I’d rather my devices show me the world as it really is.
Can’t we have both ethical business behind the app and excellent UI/UX?
For example, Ivory. I haven’t used it myself but I used every single other app by Tapbots. They all were great. Tweetbot was an excellent app with animations, fluidity, and attention to details in both UI and UX. They don’t collect any user data in Ivory, too.
It’s fine if you like a different kind of UI/UX. But it’s not a useful heuristic to equate nice UI/UX with some sort of nefarious intent.
Thanks for the counter-example! I was not aware of it.
I’m not making some proof that you can’t have both, just the observation that there’s a trade-off here that OP doesn’t acknowledge. And if I have to choose, I know which side I’m going to pick.
Companies change over time. Just this morning we’ve heard how the once-beloved Heroku has fucked over its users. Open source, while certainly not perfect, provides a greater level of security than any brand.
We really need a sane and fully open/free smartphone solution. The Librem 5 is certainly not it (mine is sitting in a box somewhere, used only once). When I last looked at PostmarketOS (which is a while ago), it seemed unusable (not having a working touch screen or modem is a bit of a no go).
Apologies for the off topic question, but what has Heroku done this morning? I can’t find and references with a quick DDG search or Lobsters search.
No problem!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34598563
https://merveilles.town/@pvh/109785398611728785 (Context: pvh worked at Heroku pre-acquisition)
Oof that could be a whole lobstrs post.
Eh, business news is off topic.
Uh yes? I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “ethical business”, but a current example might be Tapbots or iconfactory, but I’d point to Panic as being a quintessentially good business, from which I’ve never heard nor seen any kind of malicious or sketchy actions.
That was a question to the top commenter, who seemingly posited that slick UI and polished UX are somehow indicative of sketchy things going on behind their back. There are many examples to the contrary and not only on iOS/macOS.
I dunno, Google and Android seem pretty sketchy to me. I’m not a huge fan of either locked down ecosystem, but at least the iThings don’t come shipped with a stock firmware that’s already spying extra hard on you out of the box.
Oh yes. Notice that I put Chrome in the same category. What I’m pushing back against is the dismissal of open source apps without any mention of their benefits.
No one - including Gruber in this post was dismissing open source on principle, what they were commenting on is the difference in basic quality of software in the two ecosystems.
The entire point of the post is that on android there simply is no equivalently polished mastodon client to any of the good iOS ones. Many of the open source ones are available on both platforms, but on iOS there are paid commercials apps that are more polished, and on android there is not.
Historically there was an argument that android users were less likely to actually pay for apps, or were more likely to has an out of date OS, but I those problems have been fixed at this point?
This is a common refrain among people who don’t understand good UI or UX, and to instead just slap a “fun animations” dismissal on anyone/thing that they don’t care about. It basically means you’re not making an argument in good faith.
WTF does this have to do with anything? Plenty of apps do sketchy shit, and at least on iOS that’s ostensibly against the rules. It certainly has nothing do with making a polished product.
And this is nonsense.
We know how to make good applications. We know how to make good user interfaces. Saying that doing that is “infantilization” is BS. The reason apps frequently have piss poor UI and UX is because it’s cheaper, not because you’re being shown “the world as it really is”.
Here’s the thing: you have decided that being well built, polished, etc is less important to you than cost, which is fine, though of course many people disagree. But you’ve also gone and dismissed polish as being irrelevant, made dismissive and plainly false claims that good UI/UX is “adding animations” or “yahoo UX”, further said those apps are doing sketchy shit, and finally claimed that an app with good UI/UX is inherently less good than whatever bad-UI app you’re using (we know it’s bad UI, you just said good UI is inherently bad and just animations). This behavior is pretty much exactly what Gruber is saying in this post: that you don’t understand what good UI/UX is (again: you said at the beginning that you interpret anyone talking about such to be talking about pointless animations), and consider people who do value it to be inferior to you.
You haven’t made a civil comment (is there an argument here in between the F bombs, the “nonsense”, the “BS”?), so I’ll respond once for any readers and then disengage. My faith seems pretty good to me.
I agree that we know how to make good (enough) interfaces. I think all the open source Mastodon apps mentioned in OP have totally fine interfaces. Wanting emotional appeal beyond that, the (yes, infantilizing) pixel-perfect response to gestures and whatnot, that requires paying people. Which requires revenues. Which requires the go-go pressures to grow-grow revenue. That’s where the sketchy shit comes from.
Plenty of companies comport themselves with integrity today, absolutely. But it is equally absolute that companies that don’t grow revenues enough get acquired by companies that do. And integrity dilutes with scale.
The only way sketchy shit will stop is when people become sophisticated enough to vote with their dollars and penalize companies in the open market for bad behavior. That is what I mean by “mature enough”. We don’t do that yet.
I observe that @olliej didn’t spend a single word on the value of open source the way I have on UX, both in this comment and, believe it or not, my original. The words “sustainable authentic” were carefully chosen. I think UX is important! Even the infantilizing UX! Who doesn’t like being pampered. But it comes at a cost, so there’s a trade-off. So again, I stand by my faith, I think it’s plenty good here.
Ok, I’ll try to be as clear and “civil” as possible. First up, the only f-bomb on the page is afaict in one of your comments? But let’s get to the point.
Your post started with
Which starts with a rhetorical device to dismiss any alternate opinions. People who want polished UI, etc don’t have different priorities from you, but rather “polished UI” is just gimmicks that have no relevance to anything, so the thing they’re prioritizing is intrinsically a non issue and should be ignored. You then go and say that developers who do create software with polished UI are inherently doing sketchy stuff.
Literally the point of the post is the difference between good and good enough.
Which the article agrees with. It just says the iOS apps have better UI, which is again the point of the post
I think Gruber harps on about “emotional appeal”, but he’s talking about apps that are well designed. That isn’t infantilizing unless you consider good UI and UX to be inherently infantilizing, which I don’t think you do based on other comments, but your statements here are saying that that is what is happening.
There are OSS projects I have used in the past that had good UI, even without funding. What it requires is people who are sufficiently interested in design to spend their spare time volunteering. My experience back in the day was that designers were looked down on by OSS coders, which I know pushed at least a few talented designers away from involvement in OSS, and I can’t imagine the folk I knew were the only ones who got pushed out.
But otherwise you have to pay UI designers, just like you would have to pay any other developers.
No, it doesn’t. There are plenty of developers who charge for their products directly. You get sketchy stuff in free apps, because if something is free but costs money to make, then the “consumer” is in fact the product”.
Plenty of companies are small and self contained, and have gone for decades (Panic is more than 25 years old at this point). Unless your argument is that you cannot ever trust any commercial product, in which case you’re implicitly saying that no developer should earn anything.
Because the article isn’t about OSS vs commercial software, it’s about the degree of UI polish in android vs. iOS apps, in the context of mastodon clients. There are paid and unpaid on each platform, and Gruber is saying the best of the android clients are less polished than the best on iOS. I might have commented on the comparison between OSS and commercial software if that was what the article was about.
And again, you are being dismissive of people saying they prefer polished UI. Good or polished UI does not mean infantilizing, or “being pampered”. You prioritize UI below functionality, because you appear to believe they’re contradictory, but the people saying they value UI polish are not saying “over functionality” - we have access to a lot of software that says they’re not, and so given the choice pay for the better UI.
I continue to feel that your original post was not particularly made in good faith due to the opening dismissal of anyone having different priorities.
I don’t see it as “fun animations” as much as consistency of a decent user experience. I use both iOS and Android on a daily basis and see some of these issues. Android doesn’t even offer a consistent copy paste behavior. Sometimes it’s a long press, sometimes it’s a double tap, and it drives me nuts. I don’t think Android should copy iOS, but things could be so much better on Android. I guess as long as it’s good enough (cheap enough) to get the customers to give them all their data, Google will be happy with the status quo.
(yes, I understand you can run Android without Google services, but let’s be honest that this is extremely niche, cumbersome and exacerbates the problems of user experience)
Wow, really? How many more decades do you think it will take?
Look around. How long has it taken our laws, construction, banking, plumbing infrastructure to get to where they are? Why would you expect software to be faster? It’s a fundamentally new medium, with whole new categories of failure modes.
A lot of computer technologists wear the rose-tinted sunglasses of unquestioning neophilia. In essence, they’re too busy chasing the latest new and shiny with no discernment of the good, and they can’t see much farther than the shiny thing sitting under their noses at the moment. And of course, the new thing is better than everything that came before and will be better than everything that came after – until a new new thing comes along to replace it.
I’m glad this was posted, because John Gruber has such different software values than I do. He seems to think of app development as being akin to making films (he even has a Kubrick quote), where meticulousness, look-and-feel, and polish matter much more than utility. He judges other pieces of software the way a filmmaker judges other films – he’s looking for artistry. But I view software as a utility first, and artwork second. And especially so for software running daily on my pocket computer (smartphone).
Meanwhile, many of my core software values don’t get a mention from him. Like the fact that there is way more open source software for Android than for iOS, and this goes down to every layer. Or, the fact that Android’s developer toolchain is entirely x-platform, allowing developers to tweak and modify software regardless of what desktop operating system they use.
I love Apple’s design values. When I have my design cap on, there’s a flow of admiration in the direction of macOS and iOS. And I even participate in the Apple ecosystem a little, with a Mac Mini & iPad. But my daily developer workstation is Linux, and my daily phone is Android. Thinkpad X1C and Pixel 7, because I do care about well-designed utility.
And both have f/oss software, programmability, and utility as their core values, aligned with mine. Thus, for me, and for many like me, that’s the show.
Now… when I’m recommending unfussy hardware/software for my non-techie friends & family? Sure, it’s the Macbook Air and iPhone, then. But I’m really glad a choice exists on the market for people like me, and I’m not sure what value there is in bashing the other side just because it doesn’t share your values.
The conclusion you don’t state, and perhaps don’t draw, is “the iphone apps that focus on look-and-feel are less functional than the android apps that don’t”. I certainly don’t draw that conclusion.
Look and feel matters for functionality. Those of you who haven’t read Jef Raskin’s book should read it, particularly chapters 2-4. One example: How many per cent of the touches/gestures hit and act on an item that wasn’t there yet when the user’s brain decided to act? This is easily measured with user testing, videos and questions, and one of the chief ways to reduce the number is to add slick little animations and transitions, so that touch targets don’t appear suddently, but rather slide in, grow, shrink in ways that the brain use.
Yes, I don’t draw that conclusion either. I think iOS and macOS apps are perfectly functional – and sometimes moreso than Android or Linux counterparts. But I don’t think John Gruber was treating good design as being in service of function. He was treating good design as a showcase of craft and artistry. (Perhaps even of commercial ambition, as he derides the Android Mastodon projects as “hobby projects”, while praising the iOS “commercial” ones.)
100% agree with you that Jef Raskin has some great thoughts on the utility of good design (many of which could benefit the f/oss world). There was some interesting work in this direction a few years back in the Linux desktop world by the (now defunct) non-profit Yorba.
Gruber is solidly from the background of Mac indie apps like Panic’s stuff, which place a premium on design and functionality but are also vehicles for sustaining small businesses.
Try sending him mail. Ask “is a low error frequency a sign of good craftsmanship?”
I can guess his answer.
I’m going to post my own answer.
That which we do is follow rules of thumb. We don’t reason from first principles, even when those first principles are important to us.
Our real goal is to build applications and services that serve the users well, which includes being low on frustration. Being low on errors and frustration is… being pleasant to use, which ends up being some rules of thumbs about animations and general slickness.
His very first example, Ice Cubes, is open source.
You may be interested in the work of Richard Sapper. He was the original designer of the first black Thinkpad 700c. He kind of embodies an alternative to the Deiter Rams school of design (which Apple follows closely) where every device is very solutions-oriented.
You could always just install the PWA as well and it’s fine—I mean I’m still using FOSS Tusky because it gives me all the functionality I need (while fixing my only issue with the web UI: there’s no way to change “favourite” to “favorite”). Too bad iOS can’t get PWA Push Notifications if you wanted to know about DMs lol.
Subway Tooter ride or die. Its look and feel is… brutally functional, but I love it. Sorta like Reddit is Fun (is fun).