iOS UI elements porting on Android

Question

ladies and gentlemen!

Very often on my job I meet the following requirement from the client, when developing android applications: \"make it look like and iPhone app\".

Answer 1

There is no library to port iphone views to Android but if you are starting both applications from the scratch you have two possible approach to share views between both platforms.

First one is using WebViews and coding HTML, JS and CSS. This kind of app is called hybrid.

Second one is using openGL. You can do it directly or using a framework like cocos2d-x.

Depending on what you are willing to you should choose what to use.

Answer 2

There is no iphone UI library for android that I know of. What you can do is, get the iphone GUI psd and redo it for 3 sizes of android (for the 3 size ranges) and use the elements of these psd's to theme your application.

I get these kind of similar requirements. Sometimes it wont be much about the looks but about the navigation flow of the application and how new views or activities are animated. From my experience, there is no easy way to do it. So I end up making a lot of adjustments and hacks to get the job done. And I over bill the client. :)

Btw you could also consider libraries such as Sencha Touch, it will look the same in all phones that use a webkit browser.

Answer 3

To expand on Martyn's comment, which I agree with.

Perhaps there is a great reason why a client would ask for this, but in many cases I bet they might benefit from being challenged on this requirement. If I was presented with this request, I would first ask "Why?". Perhaps they'd answer as follows:

1. we need a consistent experience across platforms, or
2. it will be more cost effective to design once and apply to each platform, or
3. it doesn't matter why, just do it!

Here are some responses for each:

1. each user will generally have one phone, and won't require the experience on Android to be identical to iPhone - they only care that it works and looks great on their phone. In fact, an Android user would prefer if you used the UI patterns that are more common to the platform, as opposed designing to match iOS. Likewise for an iPhone user.

2. we have found that having a designer create a set of creative for iOS allows us to pretty much use the creative as-is for Android. Even though Android might have Tabs on top, versus bottom, we are still able to take the backgrounds, button styles, fonts and color schemes from one platform to the next. There will be slight differences, but overall the brand and look should translate well. Here is an example of porting a single creative design across platforms: http://daleburgosdesign.com/

3. if they answer in this manner, you might want to consider passing on the job. Pixel perfect matching across platforms is tricky aside from the ideas offered in previous answers (OpenGL and the use of a WebView - via Macarse). If the client can't provide good reasoning for this tricky requirement, then it might be best to search for your next client.

Not a straight forward answer to your question, but I hope you find it helpful!

Answer 4

AFAIK there are no 'iOS-alike' widget libraries for Android.

Because of this, you could reasonably charge the client more for both development and support, thereby providing an incentive to stick with the standard Android UI design and principles.