Android UI Design: New vs. Old

A sailboat on Lake Ontario
A sailboat on Lake Ontario
Minimalist design is a sense of calm.

Earthquake Track was first released in 2019.  Its user-interface (UI) was built by using some of the modern Material Design components at the time.  In the past decade, UI components were evolving quickly in terms of aesthetic, practicality and programmability.  Such improvements were made possible thanks to better hardware and software.  For mobile device hardware, there were faster processors of multiple cores, and higher screen resolution of Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) and way beyond.  These improvements allowed UI components to have beautiful details reacting in parallel smoothly.  For software, the API improvements for app development were substantial.  Those could be seen on screen included many more widget components such as Constraint Layout, Drawer Layout, Card View, and Recycler View.  Those couldn't be seen on screen, such as the Android Jetpack architecture that enabled better separation of concerns (i.e. segregation of programming logics) and reactive UI by Live Data and Observer, enabled developers to build applications with better interactions that are more intuitive and reliable.  (Refer to my older post if interested in this topic: Modern Android Architecture by using View Model).  There were also cloud platforms for mobile apps such as Firebase becoming available to the public.

In 2011, when I first published Mortgage Calculator Free on Google Play, the mobile devices were slower, and with smaller memory and lower screen resolution.  In 2014, the revolutionary Java 8 was initially released.  Android development later on became backing by modern language features including Lambda Expression, and then Android Studio (IntelliJ IDEA) providing automated reminders to help developers using the newer language features, for example, switching from Anonymous Class to Lambda Expression. The Integrated Development Environment (IDE) functionality, to a certain extent, prepared developers transitioning to the programming paradigm that involves a mix of object-oriented programming and functional programming.

For a comparison of the modern Android's Material Design UI and the old Android UI, here are some screen-shots of Earthquake Track, and Mortgage Calculator Free respectively.


Earthquake Track (2021) 


    

    



Mortgage Calculator Free (2012)







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