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Who's copying whom?

nickdalzell

nickdalzell

Extreme Android User
Google Play Music:



iOS 7 Music App:



Almost alike to a tee, down to the little black EQ animation... is Google copying Apple or is Apple copying Google, or is Google the UI designer of both? i'm confused.
 
it sure looks like Google had a hand in both to me....i mean the overuse of white gives it away as well, to say notbing of iOS7 using the same pastel colors Google fell in love with recently. hell even the font is the same (roboto)
 
nickdalzell said:
it sure looks like Google had a hand in both to me....i mean the overuse of white gives it away as well, to say notbing of iOS7 using the same pastel colors Google fell in love with recently. hell even the font is the same (roboto)
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I don't think Apple is likely to be using Roboto, that's a Google font specially made for Android. AFAIK Apple uses Helvetica as the default for iOS and OS X. But then many of these generic type san-serif fonts look very similar anyway, like Arial.

The music player in my Samsung does the animated EQ thing in a playlist, many music players do that. Only real difference is the background is black with light coloured text, rather than the other way round.
 
I remember reading that it was a helvetica variant in iOS7 - Helvetica Neue light I think.

But yeah, unless you are looking very closely these things are fairly similar.
 
If Apple did copy Android, I hope for their sake they only took the look and not the feel - Play Music is the single worst music player EVER!
 
SiempreTuna said:
If Apple did copy Android, I hope for their sake they only took the look and not the feel - Play Music is the single worst music player EVER!
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I used to think that until I started heavily using All Access. It's the best all around music service ever. I don't know what I would do without it anymore. I'm addicted.
 
It's not really surprising that there are similarities; it's difficult to present a list of tracks on limited display real estate in any other form while keeping it functional. It's raison d'etre is to present audio rather than visual content, after all. ;)
 
Have you recently bumped your head? Those are very dissimilar looking to me. Sure, they have a list of song titles with artist and album artwork, kind of have to have that, but the rest is very different.
 
that is because iOS is lacking the album art for 90% of my songs. with Play Music, all of it is online and i cannot copy album art over to iOS so it differs there, but the UI is very similar to me.

as for the service, i'd rather pay a monthly fee for unlimited access, than a per-song fee like iTunes does.
 
nickdalzell said:
that is because iOS is lacking the album art for 90% of my songs. with Play Music, all of it is online and i cannot copy album art over to iOS so it differs there, but the UI is very similar to me.
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I thought iTunes could download the album art for the songs that you already have. Sure it can download the album art for things like Alice Cooper or Bob Seger, they're not exactly obscure. ;)

nickdalzell said:
as for the service, i'd rather pay a monthly fee for unlimited access, than a per-song fee like iTunes does.
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It's a different model isn't it. One is you're basically renting the music which is locked down with DRM vs purchasing individual songs/albums outright and doesn't have DRM. With the Play subscription service, stop paying the monthly fee and the music goes away.

What I do for my music is neither of those, because of location.
 
the album art is embedded with the files. those are all downloaded MP3s via some third-party app, some show album art out of the box, others blank. iTunes is just pulling up the album art as Android would, except that in the first pic above, those songs are not MP3s and are stored online via Play's unlimited access, so the album art comes from their end.

often times with downloaded music, the album art is not accurate. i got one song (C.W. McCall's Convoy) that has album art of a chimp sticking his fingers in his ears. other songs have used the album art not fitting for their artist. a few dozen i'm working on deleting and replacing have the same Midnight Oil cover art despite not being a Midnight Oil song.
 
iTunes music hasn't had DRM since January 2009.

I'm not seeing the visual similarity.

Form ought to follow function, so it's easy to expect some similarity that way.

If the similarity is white/pastel then I guess beauty, like justifiability, is in the hands of the beholder and you just don't know what people will do next.
 
Slug said:
It's not really surprising that there are similarities; it's difficult to present a list of tracks on limited display real estate in any other form while keeping it functional. It's raison d'etre is to present audio rather than visual content, after all. ;)
Click to expand...


i would extend this arguement in physical phone design!!

flat check
retangle check
display check
buttons locations check
rounded corners check
 
nickdalzell said:
the album art is embedded with the files. those are all downloaded MP3s via some third-party app, some show album art out of the box, others blank. iTunes is just pulling up the album art as Android would, except that in the first pic above, those songs are not MP3s and are stored online via Play's unlimited access, so the album art comes from their end.

often times with downloaded music, the album art is not accurate. i got one song (C.W. McCall's Convoy) that has album art of a chimp sticking his fingers in his ears. other songs have used the album art not fitting for their artist. a few dozen i'm working on deleting and replacing have the same Midnight Oil cover art despite not being a Midnight Oil song.
Click to expand...

Album art has been a real PITA for me in both iTunes and on Google Play. Neither could find art for a good majority of my music(little of which is obscure). When I side-loaded my music onto my phone, Google Play found some album art, but for the rest it took the album art from MC Hammer's You Can't Touch This and applied it to everything else(in super low resolution). It was weird. I finally took all the music off of my phone, uploaded it to Google Play through the Music Manager, and then went and used the Play website to manually set the album art and tags for each album(lots of searching on Google).

The downside is I no longer can access my music through mass USB(one of the main reasons I hate iOS)...which also means that other apps can't access said music either(such as my alarm app). But the upside is that I can easily sync music on other devices and cast it to my tv via Chromecast.
 
I have my iPod Classic for music. No smartphone memory or SDCard can hold my music. As for the copying game it's stupid. Everyone copies everyone in the tech world and if it's a good thing who cares?
 
yvynydun.jpg
 
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