Thanks for the link, hadn't seen anything for Android yet. But it does nothing to alleviate the problem. Re-post of my other comment:
You still need to make a ton of resolution-specific images if you want the sharpest possible image, which - again - matters for perceived value. And you're royally screwed if you do pixel-art instead of something easily resized.
The issue here isn't for all applications, it's for highly styled applications, which are kicking ass lately and are important for perceived value of a device. Resolution independence and fluid-ish layouts do indeed make basic UI extremely easy. But basic UI evidently can't compete equally with a more stylized UI, as the iPhone shows pretty clearly.
But basic UI evidently can't compete equally with a more stylized UI, as the iPhone shows pretty clearly
Support that. I can name several apps on my iPhone that are hardly high-style, yet useful and well received (Quickoffice, iFitness, Yelp!... just to name 3 on my home screen).
Larger than this. This is something that vector graphics solves extremely well. You want really nice images at multiple resolutions? Illustrator is your friend.
Highly styled apps have taken a while to arrive on Android, but they definitely are arriving. The new Twitter app for Android, for example, is might nice looking. (here's an article about it: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/04/twitter-for-android-robots-l... , and another here: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/05/twitter-for-a.... One thing not readily apparent from the screenshots is the way the whole app is animated. The little bird and cloud backgrounds are animated and move on almost every screen.
Top 20 selling apps in the Apple store[1]. A quick perusal will convince most people. I didn't check all of them, but I saw ONE which used standard display components at all in the screenshots (the guitar one), and it only does so for setting preferences.
This is hardly a problem that's unique to Android. Like I mentioned before, the i* platform already has 2 resolutions to support and almost certainly will have a 3rd shortly. If the i* platform is offering a better long term solution than what the Android API's currently offer, I'd love to see a link to more information about it.
The whole "fragmentation" thing, at least in terms of API's and developer issues, is more of a talking point than a reality.
If you consider rotation, the iPhone currently has 4 resolutions and will soon have 6. There's also the expanded green status bar during calls, a red one during voice recording, and another color for background VoIP apps in 4.0 -- so it'll really be 12 resolutions.
The real difference is that with iPOS, Apple doesn't expect developers to automatically handle new device resolutions, and no developer expects to not be informed of new resolutions. Android developers are expected to use fluid layouts, and don't expect to be able to keep up with the release of new and customized devices by a bevy of semi-incompetent manufacturers.
You still need to make a ton of resolution-specific images if you want the sharpest possible image, which - again - matters for perceived value. And you're royally screwed if you do pixel-art instead of something easily resized.
The issue here isn't for all applications, it's for highly styled applications, which are kicking ass lately and are important for perceived value of a device. Resolution independence and fluid-ish layouts do indeed make basic UI extremely easy. But basic UI evidently can't compete equally with a more stylized UI, as the iPhone shows pretty clearly.