I’ve noticed in the last few months that many apps have changed the style of their Android apps. I’m talking about big apps, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Market. The visual change is pretty simple. The name of the app is displayed in a titlebar at the top, and there are possibly buttons or other commonly used functions along the titlebar. This was a simple but nice change, so I decided to change the style of my app(s?) to follow the same style. Here’s the result:

I only ended up converting my VIVA Next Bus app, because frankly I’m not too interested in maintaining any of my other apps except for Condado (and Condado doesn’t have room for a titlebar).

I think one of the reasons that app design is moving this way is because dedicated spaces for buttons are less prevalent on tablets, so if you want a user to have the capability to do certain things, you have to make sure the controls exist in the UI (i.e., there may not be a menu button to bring up the context menu). I think this is a reversal of positions, because I seem to remember that around the 1.6 time frame, phones did not have many dedicated buttons (and the guideline was to add controls within the UI). Then around Eclair time frame, phones started having touch screen or hardware buttons and app developers took advantage of that.

Now, evolution in design have made things act like they do on the web. The logo is at the top left, and key functions are in the top navigation section. You can also click the logo to go back to the main page (although in my implementation it acts like a back button). It should be more intuitive to understand, and actually I think the titlebars typically contrast well with the content so they look pretty nice.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, graphicdesign