zlacker

>>iBelie+(OP)
My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly, and I fear that in the name of making "everything work everywhere", we're going to compromise a bunch of apps that worked beautifully on one platform in favor of making them work adequately on several platforms.

I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"*

* Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM.

>>Admira+K7
Android tablet apps have always sucked because Android was designed with the expectation that you can easily and automatically scale apps to different sizes.

It turns out, you can--within particular size classes. And Android's ability to support lots of different phone screen sizes was a major advantage over iOS for a long time.

But, Apple's requirement that iPad apps have separate, hand-tuned interfaces was also a huge advantage for iOS, since blown-up phone apps suck on tablets.

So now we know that the right approach is adaptive designs, but within certain bounds. Both iOS and Android have this now (iOS is more adaptive, and Android supports custom tablet layouts), the problem for Android tablets being that it's not enforced or required.

Anyway, all of this is to say that while platforms can and should do a lot of work to make it easier for developers to support multiple device classes, screen sizes, and so on, it will never be automatic.