Android apps catch up yet?

[drbrock]

I was thinking of picking up an S3 as a replacement of my iphone 4 for 200 bucks. I like android for everything other than apps. That is why I left from my EVO with ICS. The apps were just horrible. Has the app quality caught up yet?

Wish I can get a note 2 for 350 but have yet to see anything come near that price.

Sprint just released lte in my area so I really want to upgrade to an lte phone. Iphone 5 is not worth the 450 price tag.

 

[Red Storm]

"Apps" is a bit vague, can you be a little more specific? What apps do you use?

 

[drbrock]

I use the fandango, ign, chive, slickdeals, amazon, ign, meetup and walgreens app. I use the Apple Podcast App the most. I drive a lot so I like listening to podcasts instead of Pandora. I don't game at all so I am not looking for that. I have a RX100 as my camera to walk around with so I barely use the camera unless I need to scan something through the amazon app.

 

[WelshBloke]

I use the fandango, ign, chive, slickdeals, amazon, ign, meetup and walgreens app. I use the Apple Podcast App the most. I drive a lot so I like listening to podcasts instead of Pandora. I don't game at all so I am not looking for that. I have a RX100 as my camera to walk around with so I barely use the camera unless I need to scan something through the amazon app.

I only use Amazons app from those and that works fine, but for podcasts pocketcasts is great.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I'd say a good number of them HAVE caught up. It took Facebook like 3 years though. I'm pretty happy for the most part. Twitter is finally half decent looking.

Somehow I find the SMS apps to be behind the times still. GoSMS turned to trash, but Handcent has always been bloated and still has an ugly 2.x look.

But in general iOS still comes first, especially with startups. I live in San Francisco, and I have plenty of friends working in startups and they always say Android version coming soon (which means never unless their startup takes off). Speedtest got redesigned on iOS, but nothing on Android. Dropbox icon and design looks cleaned up on iOS but no Android yet. Foursquare typically gets new features on iOS. The Android one slowly gets redesigned to match iOS and then they'll yank iOS in the other direction. I really don't get foursquare.

 

[drbrock]

SMS is about the only other feature I use on a regular basis. Bite SMS is pretty solid. It stinks that apple is still king. Android is putting out stellar devices. I hope maybe this generation will put android on top of development. I guess I am stuck with an iphone 5 with LTE then.

 

[zerogear]

For the most part, major app developers have embraced Holo interface and is generally pretty unified.

As for Facebook -- I really wish they use a menu button in their action bar instead of using the action overflow. It's annoying that their app is using an action overflow bar when the device doesn't have a physical menu button, takes away from screen real estate, apparently someone didn't get the memo from Google.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/say-goodbye-to-menu-button.html

 

[Deeko]

Some yes, some no. I would say the quality has noticeably improved in the post ICS era, but there are still major developers that are iOS first for new features - Twitter, for example. Its definitely much better than it used to be.