Android Lollipop?

[bjacks12]

iPhone already has some of the things that Lollipop is introducing. Google's implementation is a lot nicer to look at, though.

Lockscreen notification cards, while limited and part of TouchWiz since the Galaxy S2, have been standard fare since the first iPhone in 2007. it's a feature that has been missing in AOSP until this new update and i'm happy to see it as well.
Agreed.

ART is the closest Android will get to having the buttery smooth stutter-free scrolling that iPhone users have had since day one as well. i tested it with a custom ROM on my old S3 and i loved the results, can't wait to see them finally land on the Nexus 10.
ART is amazing. I've been using it exclusively since I got Kitkat on my N4 last year. I'm excited to see it exit beta and be the default on all devices. For extra snapiness, speed up animations in Dev Options

Hopefully this will bring more iOS users to Android and thus triple the rankings. Overall, though, most of the UIs today maintain some level of consistency unlike in the past, where i'd once pick up an iPad after months of using a Galaxy Tab and forget where x feature was in y.
I think everything eventually converges at some point.

No more. thank goodness! i use many different types of devices. i am appreciating some level of continuity between different platforms for a change. Also hoping that Material Design takes off since flat design looks horridly dated to me.
I hope so too. It seems even Samsung is feeling the Material bug.

I think between Material Design and Google making an effort to bring the Nexus mainstream, we'll see a bigger interest in Google's interpretation of Android.

 

[nickdalzell]

I quite like how Samsung's TouchWiz and LG's Optimus UI are adhering to the Google Material standard, despite me once being repulsed by the way Google's apps looked and preferred the largely polished looks of TouchWiz Nature UX 2.x and the older LG UI.

Google finally got some design sense in their apps and the other skins are reflecting it perfectly as well, although if the leaked screenshots are accurate, LG could add some type of gradient or texture to the G3 UI since their interface is just too flat, even for Material. kinda clashes.

I wonder if someone new has arrived at Google to do their design because the last iteration of their apps were ugly as sin.

 

[bjacks12]

You have Matias Duarte to thank for Google's current design trend. He's the Vice President of Design for Google products. Prior to that he was the director of android user experience. He was largely responsible for the design of Honeycomb and HOLO in general.

 

[nickdalzell]

Holo was hideous. and when Play Store got the card interface the first time it was also hideous. either way i'm excited about Material. For the first time i love using the Google apps since their Material updates.

 

[Rxpert83]

Holo was hideous. and when Play Store got the card interface the first time it was also hideous. either way i'm excited about Material. For the first time i love using the Google apps since their Material updates.

+1 on the play store. When the new one came out, it couldn't stop looking/interacting with it

 

[nickdalzell]

It's perhaps the first time it has never errored out on me. the visual update is beautiful, but the lack of 'could not be downloaded due to an error...' is a welcome change as well.

I also got the APK for Gmail when it hit Android Police. love that too. While i originally saw the lack of color status bar icons a problem, i have noticed they even look nicer since the Material updates have also made little changes to the style of icon shown up there. they look much nicer!

 

[bjacks12]

Loving the material apps. I did like HOLO though. That was one of the biggest reasons I went with a Nexus over getting another Samsung(to be fair, touchwiz has come a long ways aesthetically since the S1).

 

[nickdalzell]

Holo didn't work for me mainly because of the bright electric blues everywhere. Those always strained my eyes. Everything else was so dark it came off very uninviting