In the era when mobile phone operating systems are flourishing, it is also the era when product managers have the most headaches, because different designs need to be made according to different operating systems. Today, there are basically only two camps of Android and IOS left in the mobile operating system. It is only necessary to deal with the differences in the interaction between Android and IOS to do a good job in product design.
Since the development of mobile operating systems, there are basically only two camps, Android and IOS. Although some platforms still provide App downloads for other mobile operating systems, they are basically no longer maintained and upgraded.
In the era when mobile phone operating systems are flourishing, it is also the era that product managers have the most headaches, because the interaction of each system is different, so product managers are required to make different designs according to different operating systems when doing product design.
Such headaches have been reduced sharply with the gradual demise of the mobile operating system, and the two major systems of Android and IOS have learned from each other in the development process, and the interaction is basically the same. Now the product manager only needs to deal with the interaction between Android and IOS. The difference part can do a good job in product design.
If you are an App product manager, but have only used one of the systems, and are not familiar with or even used the other system, I believe this article will be helpful to you.
*The Android system in this article generally refers to all Android-based operating systems, including Android-based operating systems customized by major mobile phone manufacturers, not limited to Android native systems; the author does not have an IOS device at hand, and some pictures related to the IOS system are From the Internet, it is intended to illustrate the principle, and may be different from the actual interface, please pay attention to distinguish.
1. Swipe back gesture
At the beginning of the birth of IOS, it was set that there is only one way to return to the operation, which is to click the "Back" button in the upper left corner. " button, so when IOS 7 was released in 2013, it brought an "extremely advanced" side-swipe back gesture.
This interactive gesture has brought inspiration to the product managers of mobile phone manufacturers. Domestic customized Android systems have followed up, and also brought a global side-swipe return gesture, which can not only slide from left to right, but also from right to left , for large-screen mobile phones, it is simply not too easy to use, and even the native Android system has followed up and developed corresponding gesture operation functions.
At this time, fruit fans can’t sit still anymore. With the development of mobile phone screens in recent years, the return gesture that has not changed is in stark contrast. Fruit fans began to complain: why do you have to press and hold the left edge to activate the side sliding back gesture? gesture? Why can't it be activated from the right? Why can't it be activated anywhere?
The above is the background and status quo of the return gestures of the two major systems. Therefore, when we design the App return gestures of these two major systems, we need to make a difference in the interaction.
First of all, it is not recommended to design edge side-swipe gestures for Android apps, such as side-swipe back to the previous level, or side-swipe to display menus, etc., because the global side-swipe back gesture mentioned above is almost a standard function of all Android systems. And these return gestures are system-level, which means that the side-swipe gesture inside the app may never be triggered.
Of course, some mobile phone operating systems have considered this problem, so they optimize the return gesture, swipe from the bottom to activate the global return function, and swipe from the top to trigger the function in the application.
In the app that supports side-swipe gestures in the figure below, when the edge side-swipe is activated at the bottom of the app, a prompt icon for return appears, indicating that the return gesture is activated; when the edge-swipe is activated at the top of the app, the function of the app is triggered. This app also happens to return to the previous page by sliding sideways, and the "floating window" function can also be triggered during the sliding process.
We usually hold the mobile phone with one hand, and when we operate with the thumb, whether we use the left hand or the right hand, the touch area is mainly concentrated in the middle and bottom of the application.
Therefore, to trigger the side sliding function in the application, both hands are required at the same time, which is not a convenient operation for the user.
Some people will also say that you can make a global side-swipe gesture. The picture below is another application. Global side-swipe gestures have been made on multiple interfaces of the application. The gesture can be triggered even without touching the edge. It is easier to trigger than side-swipe. However, in this application , side-swiping gestures on different interfaces will trigger completely different functions, and there are 3 completely different interactions in the screenshot below. Let’s not talk about the time and effort required to distinguish the different functions of gestures according to different interfaces during development. It’s just that users are dazzled when operating these functions, and when they are dismissed because they cannot predict what functions will be triggered by sliding sideways, For users, this is not a function with a qualified experience.
There is also a risk of global sideslip, which is false triggering. When operating with one hand, the user's touch track is a fan-shaped shape. When the user slides up and down, if the finger is not flexible enough, or the app's recognition of gestures is not adjusted accurately enough, it is easy to slide left and right and accidentally touch .
Finally, let’s summarize the edge-sliding design of Android applications:
1. Try not to do side-slip design, Android-level side-slip return is convenient enough;
2. If you have to do it, try not to add multiple functions to the slide, such as slide to return to the previous level, and at the same time trigger the "floating window" function;
3. If side sliding is necessary, the functions contained in side sliding should have other supplementary trigger methods that are more in line with user intuition. For example, you can also return through the upper left corner, and you can also trigger the "floating window" function by hiding the menu.
It's not the same in IOS. Apple requires that apps put on the App Store must follow Apple’s specifications for the side-swipe back gesture operation, that is, return by side-swipe on the edge. It conforms to the specification, and my personal suggestion is that the design of global slide back can also be added to the application on the IOS side.
Although I mentioned above that there is a risk of false touch in the global side-slip return, before IOS makes a "more advanced" upgrade to the design of the side-slip return to the edge, at least to some extent, it can alleviate fruit fans' dissatisfaction with this design. The emotion of disgust. However, it should be noted that for the global side-swipe on IOS, it is recommended to only return to the previous page. After years of "education" on IOS, fruit fans already know very well that sliding from left to right is the logic of returning to the previous page. , IOS system applications and even tab page switching require users to click to complete, there is no side-swipe switching operation, so product managers do not need to "create" new interactions to "difficult" fruit fans.
2. Long press and slide
Since the birth of Android, the system level has been flooded with various long-press operations: long-press to enter the edit mode, long-press to pop up the hidden menu, and long-press the icon in the control center of the mobile phone to enter the setting page, etc. Android users can almost predict when they see a certain interface. To what extent can a long press operation be performed.
On the other hand, IOS tries its best to avoid the operation of long press. At the beginning of its birth, the long press operation of IOS was mainly limited to the long press icon on the desktop to enter the desktop editing mode, and the long press icon in the task center to enter the edit mode (before IOS 7). Press to select text, etc., and the IOS system has almost no function of long-pressing to pop up a hidden menu. Only when long-pressing the input box, a menu for copying and pasting text will pop up.
In 2015, Apple brought the extremely advanced Force Touch technology to the newly released iPhone 6s, which enables the mobile phone to sense the pressing force when the user operates the screen. Quick operation, press again the text message list to quickly preview the conversation content, press again the picture to quickly preview the big picture, etc.
However, fruit fans did not buy it. The heavy press operation appeared on the mobile phone for the first time, which made fruit fans at a loss. When operating, they must control the force. The operation of pressing, the force is strong, directly open the article, finally master the force, open the preview, the finger has to be pressed all the time, and then go back when you let go, and it will open directly when you press hard, and you can only see the first page when previewing. One page, for users, such a laborious operation is not as convenient as directly clicking to open it.
Apple is also aware of this problem, so in the subsequent IOS version upgrade, the logic of re-pressing was canceled, and some shortcut operations that were originally triggered by re-pressing became long-pressing, so the long-pressing operation began to be used in the IOS system "blossom everywhere". Will iPhone users buy this new set of logic? Before writing this article, I found a friend who uses an iPhone to find out, and summarized the few long-press operations he uses the most in his daily life:
- Long press to copy and paste text
- Long press to identify the QR code
When I told him that long-pressing the flashlight icon in the control center will bring up the brightness adjustment function, he gave an incredulous expression. As for the shortcut operation that will pop up when you press and hold the desktop icon, he knows this, but it is triggered when he wants to uninstall the app, and he has never used it before.
Yes, Apple fans who have grown up with the iPhone still don’t have the concept of long-press operation on many interfaces. When they see the icons in the control center, they know that these icons can be clicked, but they don’t use them. Think of it together, but Android users are different. When they see the IOS control center, they know that those icons can be long-pressed, but Android users will think that long-pressing an icon should enter the settings page, not a pop-up shortcut.
The earliest list operation of IOS is to delete by sliding to the left. With the iteration of the system, the operation of the left-swipe menu is not limited to delete. Swipe left to operate the data, so you need to pay attention to follow this principle when designing the application on the IOS side.
Android is different. In the Android system, there is almost no left-swipe operation. Therefore, if the IOS interaction specification is put into the Android application, the user will be confused. When the Android user cannot find an operation , They will habitually long press, so, for the same function, the application on the IOS side is operated by sliding left, while the Android side is designed to be operated by long pressing.
3. Biometrics
In 2015, when the iPhone 5s was released, the circular home button on the front integrated the fingerprint recognition function. The iPhone changed the world again, making fingerprint recognition not only limited to attendance check-in, but Android phones also quickly followed.
At the beginning of fingerprint recognition, it was mainly used as one of the unlocking methods of the lock screen. With the proliferation of mobile payment, the scenarios of fingerprint recognition have been further enriched, and the security of fingerprint recognition has gradually developed to the extent that it can be used to replace payment passwords.
In order to improve the practicability of fingerprint recognition, whether it is an iPhone or an Android phone that supports fingerprint recognition, the interface of biometric recognition is opened. Not only system applications, but also third-party applications can use the fingerprint recognition function provided by the system in specific scenarios. However, the forms of biometric interfaces provided by IOS and Android systems are different, so it is necessary to distinguish between different interactions between applications at both ends during product design.
We can first look at the workflow of the two biometrics.
It can be seen from the figure that Android’s fingerprint recognition is all implemented through an interface, and each recognition will return the recognition result, and all interfaces and interactions need to be done by a third-party application; while IOS is different, the third-party application calls the IOS Fingerprint identification will directly trigger the IOS system-level identification interface, and the next interaction will be performed by IOS. After the user identification is successful, IOS will notify the third-party application of the identification result.
Let's look at a practical example.
The following is the interface of an Android application calling fingerprint identification. After calling, the interface waiting for identification and the page of verification failure are all displayed and prompted by the third-party application after receiving the information returned by the system fingerprint identification interface.
Let's take a look at the interaction of invoking fingerprint recognition in the IOS application. In the IOS application, after invoking the fingerprint recognition, the recognition process is directly taken over by the IOS system.
In 2017, Apple released the iPhone X. Face recognition fully replaced fingerprint recognition on the iPhone, but the core logic of calling face recognition by third-party applications is the same as calling fingerprint recognition, and can be designed with reference to the above logic.
4. Application version update
Since its inception, fragmentation has always been a major drawback of the Android system. Although there are official app stores like Google play, they have not been used in mainland China due to well-known reasons. Instead, a large number of third-party app stores have been spawned. Bean pods, Yongyongbao, etc., used to be the necessary apps for many Android users to install. As major mobile phone manufacturers gradually improve their own app store systems, third-party app stores are less and less popular, but the installation of Android apps is still uniform. And fixed installation methods, even today, only one apk installation package can avoid all app stores and install directly.
IOS is different. In 2008, the IOS App Store was launched, which means that there will be an official and only way to install third-party applications on the iPhone in the future.
Because of the above reasons, the logic of designing third-party application update versions for Android and IOS is different.
IOS requires applications to be downloaded or updated from the App Store uniformly, so when a third-party IOS application detects a new version, it will directly jump to the corresponding page of the application in the App Store for update.
When Android detects a version update, it can judge according to the device and directly jump to the official app store of the corresponding device for update.
However, the current recommendation is to directly download the apk installation package, which is also the update method adopted by most applications. However, it is recommended to put the latest version on the major app stores first before pushing the update. At present, when many mobile phones install the apk package, if the app is available in the official app store, the system will prompt you to install it in the app store, and users are easily fooled. Guide to the app store. If the version of the app store is not updated to the latest at this time, users can easily miss the update of this version.
