The problem is, it'll take years before more than Google apps and high-profile apps make use of this new design. It's sort of like the story today... there's still a good number of apps sporting the 2.3 look. So when this new release comes out you can look forward to a couple apps having the new look and feel, most apps having the 4.0 look and feel, and a decent number having the 2.3 look and feel.
That's not Google's fault though. That falls to the lazy 3rd party developers who can't be bothered to follow the OS design guidelines in any timely manner.
It is Google's fault! They've completely revamped their UI what, three times by now? And that's not even considering the minor tweaks, like 2.3 going to a black and green scheme.
Couple that with the fact that it takes a good two years before the latest Android version is on a majority of devices and it's no wonder why devs throw their hands up when faced with having to support potentially three sets of UI look and feel guidelines at any given time.
The biggest revamp was from Gingerbread's UI to the new Holo interface style introduced in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Since then, there haven't been any major changes. Everything has just been incrementally refined each year. Most of the new changes from 4.0 to 4.4.4 (the latest release on my Nexus 5) have been added support for more animation and some apps have been redesigned. Apps are moving away from clunky tabbed interfaces and navigation bar dropdowns and have mostly moved to slide out navigation.
According to the Android Platform Version Dashboard[0], 84.3% of Android users are running Android 4.0+ and Google has been adding support for many of their new APIs and design functionality to their support libraries. It's safe to say that the only applications on the Play Store that still use the Gingerbread buttons or odd custom widgets/widgets copied from iOS are lazy developers. There simply is no excuse for ignoring the style guidelines anymore.
> The biggest revamp was from Gingerbread's UI to the new Holo interface style introduced in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).
Uh, and this one they're talking about now.
> 84.3% of Android users are running Android 4.0+
And it only took nearly 3 years to pull that off...
> There simply is no excuse for ignoring the style guidelines anymore.
Yes there is: the fact that at any point in time you have to follow two or more style guidelines. Let's say I want to make a new app today targeting the new UI look and feel Google has just released. Since only a tiny fraction of Android devices are going to be running that latest version I need to target the current UI look and feel and the previous one. Bits and pieces can be bridged with the compatibility library but now that means you're saddled with programming against the compatibility library for several years. Every UI refresh brings along with it extra technical debt that developers are burdened with -- even small ones like notification bar icon changes (which happened in 2.2 -> 2.3). Take a look at last year's Google I/O app. This is the asset management required to create a "best of breed" Android app that targets as many devices as possible:
Ho-lee shit, what a nightmare. Can you blame developers for being lazy? It's hard enough just knowing what's expected of you to make an application that can a) run on a majority of devices, b) look good on said devices, and c) make use of new APIs.
There haven't been any significant UI revamps in 3 years. Applications written using the interface guidelines set out when Android 4.0 was released still look fine today since the look and feel has not changed too much in 3 years.
> Take a look at last year's Google I/O app. This is the asset management required to create a "best of breed" Android app that targets as many devices as possible:
Ummm, I don't see what you're getting at here. These assets have been the case for most versions of Android. That folder contains portrait and landscape layouts, drawables for the different device sizes (and hidpi), and translations. If you would like users to be able to user your application in other languages, you have to provide translated strings somehow. If you would like to have different portrait and landscape layouts, you have to include those layout files. That's just expected regardless of your platform. It's hardly a nightmare. You aren't required to support other languages and Android will do it's best to rearrange your interface for landscape and scale your drawables appropriately. This just allows developers to have a greater degree of flexibility and customization to ensure that their applications run well no matter the device size, orientation, or language.
It's all documented in great detail at in the Android documentation[0].
It is interesting that users are on old versions of Android. I certainly am on my devices.
They made the point that Play Services are up to date on 90-something percent of devices, which is good, as they silently push it out without telling you (usually to leave you surprised when you open Play and it looks entirely different), probably as a response to Apple's taunt in their keynote regarding the number of users on recent iOS and OSX versions.
It doesn't matter whose fault it is. It really hurts Android. I think phones are replaced often enough that the old OS will be replaced. However, people keep tablets for much longer.
