So, I've had a few days now to fiddle with with Guardian iPhone app - and I'm liking it. In an attempt to stretch my ability for unbiased appraisal to snapping point, I thought I'd do a little comparison of it to our own (unofficial) Guardian Anywhere app, for Android devices.

Incidentally, we saw a nice little uptick in usage of the latter when the iPhone app launched - and we're currently cruising at 4000 downloads (with 1700 of those being active installs). Considering that our promotion for this was a blog post here, a single tweet, and a gloriously underfunded Adwords campaign (446 clicks delivered so far), we're pretty pleased.

So, onto the comparison... looks-wise, I have to say I think the Guardian have done a much better job than us of replicating the brand, and the feel of print. The iPhone app feels like a newspaper, the Android app more like a database of stories. We've considered doing a more "papery" version for larger-screen devices like the Archos tablet, but it's unlikely to happen now - our attention is focused elsewhere for a little bit.

That said, I find the iPhone app a little "busy" - there's important navigation (search and settings) in the top corners, a navigation bar across the foot, a selector for latest and trending stories, and a feature that could be really useful (offline browsing) mixed into the foot of the main navigation. I could still find everything I wanted quickly (so my complaint feels a little churlish), but the overall sense was of extreme busyness - and I wasn't completely clear on the difference between "latest" and "trending".

Both apps make good use of the excellent pool of photography that the Guardian publish. But - and here's a key difference - from the iPhone app I can email a photo, and that's about it. On Android, I get the option to set as wallpaper or share the photo through a variety of mechanisms, highlighting one of the key advantages of the Guardian Anywhere (which is actually an advantage of Android as a platform): the interconnections between apps.

On my HTC Magic, I have apps for Facebook and Flickr installed. These apps then expose photo-sharing services to every other app on my phone - meaning that my copy of the Guardian Anywhere can automatically share photos with both of them, at zero effort for us, the developers. That's a really big win for me as a user: if I'm a member of a niche social network, my social networking app can help the Guardian Anywhere share content.

The same thing applies to the sharing of stories: I can post to Twitter easily from Guardian Anywhere, by virtue of having installed Twidroid. And I notice that within the stories themselves, links are stripped out on the iPhone (whilst being kept in on Android).

The iPhone app includes a whole load of audio content which is ace - I'm betting that more iPhone/iPod Touch owners listen to music on their devices than Android owners.

I was chuffed to see offline reading make it into the feature-set, though I can't help feeling that the value of it is reduced by the lack of running it at scheduled times in the background. One of the things I love about our Android app is that when I wake up, the news is already sitting there on my phone. With the iPhone, I have to tell the app to go grab the content now - which takes around 15 minutes. This just doesn't deliver the same sort of convenience, though lack of background processing on iPhone didn't leave the developers with any options.

I feel a mix of comfort and schadenfreude to see that downloading offline content takes about 15 minutes on the iPhone - it's the same for us on Android, and it's the number 1 complaint from our users. I'm confident that if the Guardian haven't solved this problem themselves, it's not so bad that we haven't yet...

And finally, there's distribution. I can't help but point out that the Guardian Anywhere is free, and available globally. £2.39 isn't an extremely reasonable price-point for such a high-quality iPhone app, but it's not available outside the UK, US and Canada. Whilst most of our users are UK and US, we have a sizable long tail in France, Singapore, Germany, Australia, and quite a few others, making up around 12.5% of our users.

It feels strange - a comparison of two very similar apps on Android and iPhone has ended up being a comparison of the platforms themselves, with iPhone delivering a superior overall look and feel (at a small but reasonable price) and Android making better use of background processing and connectivity between applications to improve the experience, for everyone.

Comments

[Jon Moore]

Hi Tom - thanks for the positive review. Interesting comparison - I know you could have made it clearer that the investment in the apps was massively weighted in favour of iPhone! :) You've done a fab job with the Android app - and I'm sure spent a very small % of the product time we did given it was a side project. Let's chat in the new year? Jon

[Ralph Averbuch]

Tom

As a user of your app from the moment I was given an HTC Hero in October '09, I have to say I think it's a brilliantly executed piece of software that, most of the time, does what it says on the tin. The one thing it has done is made me realise that, contrary to my own bias for print, I've found the experience of reading the paper on a hand held phone (albeit a bigger screen than phones of old) is actually quite manageable.

If it were a novel I'm sure the experience would get quite wearing, bit for the purposes of catching a few minutes here and there to read articles of interest, your app surpasses my initial doubts about consuming news in this way.

Like so many of the comments you've received, I'd add my only downer is the problems with updating taking ages and the auto update almost never works for me. I usually have to give it a push manually.

Keep up the good work and I hope the Guardian consults closely with you when they roll out the official android version.

Cheers

Ralph
http://corporate.electricnews.net

[Tom Hume]

Thanks for the comment Ralph - glad you like it.

Of the two problems you've mentioned, one might be solved by changing the wi-fi settings, as detailed here: http://www.forceclose.com/questions/420/wi-fi-dropping-overnight - could I ask you to give that a go and see if it makes a difference.

The download speed is a different matter - we think it's out of our control, particularly as the Guardian's own iPhone app (which is nothing to do with us) also takes quite a while to grab all its content. It's our number 1 complaint from users right now, and we'll do what we can to get it fixed.