Why FRONTLINE Isn’t Doing Android — Yet

[onehandle]

To kick off our tablet project we asked you all what you wanted from a FRONTLINE app. It was not a surprise to hear back that support for Android devices was high on everyone’s list. Although we wrote about this a little bit earlier, a new visualization really brought the point home for me, and I wanted to explain in more detail where we are vis-à-vis Android tablets.

Simply put, it’s too complicated for us to even consider an Android app for the first version; we’ll continue to support those viewers with mobile web. It’s not a decision we take lightly by any stretch – there’s an amazing number of low-cost tablets that have really good video viewing experiences. Although the iPad is more popular than other tablets there are still tens of millions of Android tablets out there, and we don’t want to ignore that part of our audience. But there are two considerations that gave us pause:



The above images show mobile screen sizes ranging from phones to tablets. As we’re focused on the tablet for this project, we’re only designing for the larger screen sizes. But even there, there are a wide range of sizes and aspect ratios. It’s possible to build flexible sizing for these screen layouts, just as we do for the range of desktop web screen sizes.

But the flip side to these wide variations is that in a touch experience, ergonomics plays an important role in the design. Navigational elements need to be within easy reach of the edges of the screens since people often are holding their tablets. If the experience is not fine-tuned to each variation the experience would suffer.



http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/labs/why-were-not-doing-android-yet

[dipsydoodle]

1. How does an app kill fleas on a cat ?

[backscatter712]

2. One thing that does bug me: there's still far too many Gingerbread devices out there.

They're still being sold as new, mostly as prepaid Android phones at grocery stores.

But if I were developing for Android, I'd want to avoid Gingerbread and focus on Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean - those two versions are far nicer.

That said, the screen size problem is not a new problem - it's been with us since the early days of the PC. Today, web browsers have to render in windows that can be of arbitrary size, or full-screen in one of at least a dozen resolutions. Developers have to set things up so the app knows what display it's running in, can scale elements of the GUI accordingly, and rearrange as necessary for horizontal or vertical orientations, perhaps have a tablet UI that's different from the smartphone UI. They have to do that on the iPhone/iPad too, though the number of possible resolutions are smaller.

On an Android phone, scaling UI elements and dynamically fitting them is a must. It likely is easier on iOS devices.