What’s Missing in Android Intents

What’s Missing in Android Intents(blog.inkmobility.com)

12 points by ananddass 12 years ago | 6 comments

danpalmer 12 years ago |

What's missing in iOS: Intents.

bikas 12 years ago |

tl;dr Because developer neither wasted time on Android apps nor learnt how to code properly, these kind of blog pops up. There's absolutely no random action when user presses a button, it's clear to person of intelligence level of 5 year old. Maybe author lacks that. Share intenet is quite robust even if for default gallery app shown. First, it only shows the apps that can share images/video, and also remembers the most used share so that user don't have to click to see share pop-up at all.

Groxx 12 years ago |

tl;dr: inconsistent interface, no recommendations when nothing can handle it.

Generally quite true, though the 'share' icon on Android is pretty consistent. Easily 95%+ of the apps I've used have used that same icon.

A lot of this would be / could be solved by having some way you could replace the system's chooser. I hadn't thought of that before reading this article, but that would be pretty darn cool, and could be a significant improvement.

Zigurd 12 years ago | |

If you don't like the system picker, you can pick the target before the StartActivity call using your own UI.

Groxx 12 years ago | | |

True, but this would be even more inconsistency, as each app has to do it themselves.

Zigurd 12 years ago |

tl;dr Coder's boss complains "Why can't this be like it is on my iPhone." Coder complains "Why can't Google make it easy for the cases that kind of map to iPhone functionality to have a pre-cooked UI (I suppose ShareActionProvider isn't quite it?)

The real problem is too few apps implement too few Intent filters other than Intent.ACTION_SEND.