iPad apps being better than Android tablet apps is a bad myth if you ask me

It’s been 13 years since I owned my first Android tablet, an Acer Iconia A100, and in those 13 years, one myth has been perpetuated and taken as gospel: Apps suck on Android tablets, but not on the iPad. They are amazing. I wasn’t convinced of this in 2011 and, as I have the latest ipad mini 2024 and stare at me pixel tabletI’m still not convinced by that widely accepted “truth”.

In my opinion, the reality is much more nuanced than that. Some Apps Are Better on iPad, Others Are Better android tabletAnd it really depends on what you want your tablet to do. If you’re using a larger screen to browse the web, watch YouTube, and stream content, I’d bet the iPad and Android tablets are on par. I haven’t found a single app that works better here or there. Firefox, Chrome, Plex, YouTube, Spotify, Prime Video, Amazon, Twitch, Netflix; It all works the same way.

However, I? For most of the apps I use, Android tablets offer a better app experience than the iPad, and it’s not even close to it.

Apps built from the ground up for iPad or optimized to run on iPadOS are undoubtedly the highlight of Apple’s big-screen experience. Final Cut, Logic Pro, Procreate, Affinity Designer, LiquidText, LumaFusion, Reader, and many other apps are built to run, look, and behave great on the iPad. If you’re a designer, photographer, video maker, architect, or work on anything creative and media-oriented, you’ll get the best experience on the iPad because of the wide choice of apps and the quality of that choice.

The same is true for gaming – I’m not a gamer, but I am Android Authority coworkers tell me this gaming on android tablet It’s a joke compared to the quality of games you get on the iPad.

But step away from those creative or gaming grounds a bit, and the iPad experience is no different from the Android tablet experience. In some cases, it’s even worse. Instagram? Not optimized for iPad. Whatsapp? Not optimized for iPad, although beta is available. threads? blue sky? AllTrails? Find your guidance? Roborock? And many other apps that I personally use every day aren’t made for Apple’s big screen. However, you can get the iOS version of the app, open it, tap the expand button, and find an ugly, sometimes pixelated and unoptimized mess on your beautiful large display. I’ll never go hiking with my iPad, but if I want to plan a hike on my big screen, why can’t I have a proper iPad app to do so?

It’s this duality of experiences that kills the iPad’s charm for me. I don’t want to be looking at a perfect app one moment and then switch to a useless app the next. I don’t understand how Apple is okay with providing such a poor experience to users; Maybe this is all a ploy to force more developers to optimize for iPadOS, but if Instagram hasn’t yet created an iPad app in the year of our Lord 2024, it’s safe to say the strategy worked. Not doing it.

In contrast, Instagram and WhatsApp already have native apps built for larger screens. Android foldables And pills.

Plus, Android apps are designed to be flexible from the start in terms of display aspect ratio and resolution. blame it on millions and millions android phone There are few that have ever been released and there is the notorious Android fragmentation, but the end result is that when a developer makes an app for Android, they make it for all Androids. The end result is often very good, as is the case with the GetYourGuide and AllTrails apps shown below.

However, sometimes, this may not produce the prettiest results, as evidenced by the extended Landscape Threads app that you can see in the screenshot below, but I appreciate that it’s at least possible to get a good fullscreen experience. Is. There was a brief time when Google tried to prevent this by taking an Apple-like approach to non-optimized apps (black bars on either side of the app), but this was apparently a short-lived experiment.

Now, in Android 15, there’s a setting to force all apps to go fullscreen. Unlike Apple’s Expand button, which does nothing but stretch pixels for a larger display, Android’s fullscreen setting does most of the work. This is because, once again, every app is designed to be resizable and adjustable from the start.

Inconsistent back gesture across apps ruins iPad’s big screen experience

If there’s one thing I hate most on my iPad Mini, besides the poor keyboard experience, it’s the back gesture. Or lack thereof. I would die on this hill, be resurrected, and die a million times over, but I don’t understand how Apple fans tolerate it. For example, see the screenshot below. Wanderlog, on the left, uses a home button at the top left to go back. Todoist, on the right, uses a close button at the top right of the overlay, which I can also close by swiping down. This is driving me nuts.

In an app, I can swipe left to go back; In the second, I can’t. At one point, I had to tap the At other points, I have to tap outside the pop-up to exit it. And even when swipe left is implemented, there’s no amount of swiping back that will close the app and take me back to the homescreen. No, to do that, I have to swipe up.

There’s no universal “take me back” gesture like there is on Android, and I repeatedly had to guess how to get back to the previous screen. It’s so bad that I almost never use swipe gestures even if it could work because past experience told me to expect a 20-30% success rate with it, so why waste my time. ?

On the smaller screen of the iPhone, this is already a problem for me. But on the iPad’s larger display? This is even more annoying because of the long unnecessary hand journeys between each type of return conversation. This kind of friction is silly when you just want to enjoy your content.

Every app suffers because of that incompatibility. It doesn’t matter how optimized it is for the big screen, no matter how intuitive, powerful, and unique it is, if apps – in general – are unpredictable and unintuitive, they won’t provide a good experience. Have been. And anyone who says it’s not an issue has never had the pleasure of using Android and knowing they could always do it – Always – Swipe right or left to go back a step (this is perfect if you change the hand you’re holding your tablet with), no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

The misconception that apps are better on the iPad has persisted for a long time and overstayed its welcome. By now, we should all know that it’s a matter of relativity and use cases.

If you’re interested in gaming or media creating/editing, then yes, the iPad will generally have a better app experience for you than an Android tablet. There are lots of great apps available, all optimized for Apple’s big screen and delivering an intuitive and powerful experience.

But if you don’t care about any of that, your needs are probably closer to mine: browsing, reading, productivity, content consumption, social media, messaging, travel/activity planning, etc. For those use cases, App experience on Android tablets Either equal or better – especially when it comes to non-optimized apps like Instagram, Threads, and others. It’s even unmatched if you care about consistent user interactions across all your apps.