note: i originally wrote this article for tumblr
iOS is stuck in 2015 đź’€ pic.twitter.com/Hw1HRTqDyW
— Lewis Doyle (@lewisjdoyle) January 13, 2024
saw this and i wanted to give my thoughts on it
One UI
one of the best ones so far. i don’t know if the waveform effect is simulated or based on the actual waveform of the media, but its still cool. buttons could be a little bigger, but i do like how there appears to be a collapse button
my only issue is the cover art. i’m not a fan of placing cover art as the background of media widgets. not only does it crop the cover art, but its either too bright, making the text hard to read (as seen here), or too dark, not giving it enough emphasis. spotify is a good example of it being too dark:
Google Pixel
i think this is the worst one. by putting the cover art as the background, it suffers from the same problems as the samsung one. i didn’t even notice there were 2 pages on it until just now.
but i think the biggest problem with the google pixel player is how hard they’re trying to be different. i can understand why the pause button is on the right side of the screen, but why is everything else where it is? i have never seen a scrubber with next/previous buttons on both sides of it. thats like if i put the forward navigation button on the right side of the address bar. the biggest mistake of this is that they removed the times from the scrubber to make room for those buttons.
also, little fun tidbit. the scrubber used to be a sperm, but they changed that:
HyperOS
this one is so close to being perfect. my only gripes are that the shuffle button and like button are much bigger than everything else.
iOS
this one is also close to being perfect, but not as close as HyperOS. first off, i like how big and meaty the buttons are.
for starters, the waveform in the corner is cool, but it feels slapped on at the last second. the device button could be moved to where it is, allowing 5 options instead of 4 (for some reason most apps only utilize 3)
my only other gripe is the scrubber. by not having the dot, it doesn’t signal as clearly that it can be interacted with. spotify does the same thing: if you’re on free tier, the dot is removed from the scrubber to signalize that you can’t interact with it.