This is one of John Gruber's better insights as of late. Samsung is making the right move here: sometimes, UI consistency trumps more "daring" moves. Apple's UI consistency is quite good, especially for iOS (albeit somewhat less so for Mac OS X, especially with Lion).
And there's of course the second shoe that TouchWiz is a differentiator for Samsung (as far as they're concerned anyway, users may or may not agree): it's part of the "value" they provide, and it's (tentatively) part of keeping users on Samsung phones: Samsung also has TouchWiz skins not just for Android but for Bada (their in-home OS), for WiMo (Omnia 1 and 2, long dead) and older smart-ish phones.
So from a business perspective, Samsung considers TouchWiz important for phones released under the Samsung brand, they're not going to switch to stock Android UI.
It's worth pointing out that Samsung isn't necessarily keeping compatibility with Gingerbread as they are keeping compatibility with their own TouchWiz version of Gingerbread. For the most part, this is old news. It's reasonable to assume that if Samsung is going to saddle Gingerbread with proprietary UI "improvements", they're going to do the same with ICS. The fact that it lessens the difficulty of switching from one version to the next is an unintentional side effect.
[users] would totally freak out if they OK’d an over-the-air software update that completely changed the entire UI of their phone
Microsoft does this every year with the XBox 360, and it doesn't seem to have caused anyone any major problems. Progress is difficult, but that doesn't mean we should stop progressing.
I suspect that its a different matter of updating for Android phone users, who may not be tech savvy and have just gotten the phone the AT&T store handed them, versus the much younger and more technical Xbox 360 demographic. Edit: And don't see why this wouldn't apply to iOS, too.
> Edit: And don't see why this wouldn't apply to iOS, too.
While iOS's UI has changed somewhat since release, the changes have generally been extremely subtle; the _largest_ was 4 to 5, when a few of the widgets changed a bit.
That's including PC and web games, and I expect that these sectors skew older and more casual (implies less technical) than the console market. So the Xbox demographics are likely to be quite different to the smartphone demographic.
I have another hypothesis: Maybe they don't want to make it so blatantly obvious that only a small portion of their handsets, excluding even phones introduced in 2011(1), will actually get the Android 4.0 update. So they might want to downplay the significance of Android 4.0.
(1) Like the Samsung Galaxy S Plus, which has faster hardware than my Nexus S with ICS.
Gruber is confusing two things. If someone agreed to a Windows update download and the entire UI changed then, yes, they would be surprised and rightfully distressed.
However - if they, asy, upgraded from Windows XP to Vista then they would not be. They might even be looking forward to a UI overhaul in the name of 'progress'.
Not to most users. Most users have no idea about versions of operating systems on their phone.
They bought a phone, they _may_ know that it's an Android phone, or they may just know they bought a Samsung phone. They probably don't even think about it having an operating system as such - it's a phone, not a computer, as far as most people are concerned.
Actually, people don't even think about the operating system on their computer much. They're somewhat more conscious of it, but by and large, they buy a computer and use whatever OS happened to be on it. They'll upgrade their OS when they buy a new computer.
We've been repeating this line for a line time now, but I'm not completely sure it applies.
I used to work for a big computer manufacturer from China working on their website. I worked hand in hand with designers making intranet apps, product description pages, landing pages, e-commerce, etc. We used to think like that, that users don't know anything about computers, so we focused on values, aesthetics, obvious features and price when designing product and landing pages. But one day a VP of e-commerce dropped by and said that A/B testing was showing that landing pages with technical data like processor power, RAM, disk size were working better than bare shiny pages. It turns out users are becoming more tech savvy every day.
So from that day on, whenever I think "yeah but a common user wouldn't do that" I try to get some evidence to back it up. People adapt and always surprise us.
> But one day a VP of e-commerce dropped by and said that A/B testing was showing that landing pages with technical data like processor power, RAM, disk size were working better than bare shiny pages. It turns out users are becoming more tech savvy every day.
It would have been interesting to do further testing to determine whether a page with nonsense words that looked technical did as well as tech specs. There is indeed evidence that consumers _like_ tech specs, and especially they like _larger_ tech specs; hence the race to increase megapixel counts, even at the cost of quality, and AMD's "Pentium equivalent" numbers (at a time when the Athlon 64 did more work per cycle than the P4, AMD would give a number intended to compare to the P4, rather than the chip's actual frequency).
There is, however, very little evidence that the user has the first clue about what the numbers _mean_.
That really doesn't have anything to do with what I said. Whether users can or do understand technical details is orthogonal to whether they routinely think about or change operating systems and for that matter, swap other major "components", other than through purchase of a whole new computer. Usually, they do not.
Not my mother-in-law. She doesn't really understand what an OS is, but she understands a change in user interface.
She knows enough that an upgrade in operating system will change enough that she'll be confused all over again and be frustrated trying to learn how to use her own computer, something she paid thousands of dollars for.
I believe she is still on vista, and won't upgrade because she knows how to use vista, and that was painful enough.
She is, however, the most computer unsavvy person I've ever met that actually uses a computer.
Let me introduce you to my dad. He still thinks the computer is the keyboard, and the big box is just the power supply and the Compact Disc player he plays music with.
He runs XP. He uses IE, Hotmail, Messenger and even figured out how to sign up for Facebook on his own. Way back when, he learned some Word and Excel to track his DVDs and write his memories. Sometimes I believe he is reasonably savy for an old, non-tech person.
Then I remember the time I moved his "internet" icon to a different spot on the desktop, and he freaked out because the computer didn't work anymore.
The "looking forward to" part is the problem. A simple OTA update that totals out the interface is not going to be a welcome thing unless your target audience is expecting the change.
Microsoft and Apple spend a lot of money and generate a lot of hype for their new OS changes. Google isn't really doing that expect in the tech community. Also, Microsoft (PC, trying on mobile) and Apple (PC and mobile) are the voice for the devices. Google is still in the OEM supplier stage and doesn't have the reach to the consumer level.
People -- including me -- get upset as hell when cable providers move channels around (I can't find CNN now, for example). And that's not really a UI change, either. The crappy cable guide UI generally remains the same. But now some of the "buttons" have been moved.
I would say your example is not analogous. To upgrade from XP to Vista, the user has to purchase Vista and go through the install process. To upgrade from 3.x to ICS, the user simply downloads an OTA update.
The upgrade to ICS can be done by casual users, who may not even know that they are upgrading to ICS, whereas the XP user is clearly making the decision to upgrade to a new OS.
No. When someone upgrades to Vista, they go out and buy a Vista CD. When they upgrade to ICS, they just press 'yes' in the dialog asking if they want to upgrade (or in extreme cases, do nothing; a few Android vendors have at least occasionally pushed out upgrades which happen without user intervention).
From a technical point of view probably, but from a user point-of-view, if the update can be delivered OTA? That's more questionable.
Furthermore the difference between Ginger/TouchWiz and ICS is arguably far larger than that between XP and Vista (ignoring Vista being half-baked and half-broken on release).
This kind of rationalization from Gruber and most other people here would seem rather silly to anyone who knows a thing or two about how the cell phone industry actually works.
If a major carrier wanted stock ICS on all their phones, that's exactly what they would get, and manufacturers like Samsung and LG would trip over themselves to be the first to make it happen.
Virtually all of the software you see on your phone is there because your carrier wanted it there. Any software that's missing is missing because your carrier wanted it removed. It has nothing to do with Samsung; it's not their decision. Their only goal is to make the carrier happy.
All that prime shelf space that Samsung currently enjoys depends entirely on meeting the carriers' precise specifications, and that includes all future software updates. Manufacturers compete with each other for that precious shelf space, and will do whatever the carrier wants to get it.
but samsung, HTC, etc. have to differentiate from each other to sell their phones to the carrier too.
I think Apple is changing the industry by not taking any more shit from the carriers. I'm not saying that any other company would be able to successfully do the same, but I think these custom UI skins are some sort of lame attempt to do that.
That's partially true. But more importantly, when a manufacturer like Samsung meets with a major carrier to show off their latest line of devices, the carrier will invariably come back with a list of demands and changes that they'll need to see before they'll agree to carry the devices.
In order to respond quickly to the carrier's requests, a manufacturer needs their own custom platform and code base to work from, and that's why each manufacturer has their own custom Android UI platform to work with. It's a situation RIM played very well back in 2006/2007/2008, where they not only controlled the software platform top to bottom, they provided a surprisingly flexible theme engine to allow each carrier to quickly design their own custom home screen UI; some quite beautiful (especially from some of the European and UK carriers), others not so much, but all radically different from one another.
Apple completely changed the game by creating a device that average users would gladly dump their carriers for, and that alone takes away most of the power from the carriers. Today I think Apple, Microsoft, and even RIM are pushing to change users' expectations about how much control the carrier should have over their cell phone software. But the old guard manufacturers like Samsung and LG have been amazingly successful playing the cell phone industry by the traditional rules, so I think we as consumers still have a long, long way to go before we'll see any real change from the carriers or old school phone manufacturers.
I get what Gruber is saying here, but I disagree. Now to be fair, I think the problem of consistency is real, and I think this is something Android needs to be better about.
Now, that said, I don't think the solution is to have manufacturers build proprietary visual interfaces. That's clearly at least as motivated by Samsung wanting to lock users into their user interface as it is motivated by a desire for consistency.
Full disclosure: I work for Google, but probably don't have much more to do with Android than you do. I don't speak for either Android or Google.
My brother would disagree with you. He got a Samsung phone and he's stuck with it for years for the simple fact that it's the only phone he's learned to use and he doesn't want to learn a new one. If Samsung was running a stock version of Android, he'd probably be able to switch to any other Android phone.
its far from lock in. If you're not an android use you may not know, but Android is very customizable offering several launchers. If they wanted a more stock look its very easy to get.
Sure consistency is great but it doesn't trump everything else. If that were the case we would still be using Nokia style interfaces from the 90s.
Samsung might benefit from adopting the Android 4.0 UI. If they did, assuming other vendors do the same, there would be a more unified UI throughout all Android smartphones, not unlike iOS. And people complain about Android fragmentation...
Why would a handset manufacturer want the UI on their devices to look like those on every other? The thinking here is to differentiate as much as possible - so TouchWiz helps by making the Samsung devices look different than other models you see in a store. This is the "value add" over stock Android.
"To be clear, I'm talking specifically about the user interface -- the look and feel of the platform. Most of the actual ICS features are present in Samsung's TouchWiz-modified Android 4.0: You will get things like the new multitasking menu, the revamped lock screen with optional facial recognition, and the improved system settings."
most non-casual users (ie geeks like us) would know how to get what we want (vanilla ICS). I don't see a problem, they are keeping the casual users happy with no major changes, but know that the tech savy will easily manage to just install a pure ICS if thats what they want.
Windows 8 is not an over-the-air type of automatic update. It's something a user decides to go to buy and install. This is the type of thing where you _do_ want it to look at least a little different, otherwise the user will have the feeling they paid for "nothing".
That's undoubtable one of the reasons that the Snow Leopard price was so low ($29 vs $129), even though I assume it was on the same order in terms of engineering effort.
John Gruber is a well-read author. Many of his readers frequent Hacker News.
There's a reason he's so well-read, too. His comments are frequently insightful and quickly make sense out of complicated issues. He's been my favorite online writer for years; sometimes he gets petty or partisan, but usually his writing is damned good.
Yes, and I think he hit the nail on the head in this case. HNers can be forgiven for having a bad opinion of Mr. Gruber, though, because his partisan Apple apologetics are usually what show up here. As a long-time HN reader I thought he was just a... well, to put it politely, an unpaid and especially passionate Apple PR flack, until I got more into the Apple world and ended up reading his better stuff.
It's a linked list item and most of them are short quotes and comments that encourage the reader to follow the link for more. Usually the DF links posted to HN are the longer star posts.
The entire content of the submitted article is: "[T]he vast majority of Galaxy S II users are not technically savvy, have no idea what “Ice Cream Sandwich” is, and, most importantly, would totally freak out if they OK’d an over-the-air software update that completely changed the entire UI of their phone."
That's 254 characters. Two Tweets. It's obvious Gruber enjoys special attention and the HN community does not judge submissions on individual merit.
The intro text isn't as clear as it should be. ICS for devices that shipped with TW and Froyo/Gingerbread looks the same as the OS that shipped with it. For new devices, it seems and is likely that ICS will look more ICS-y. If you excuse the acronyms.
