Comments on: Mxit Isn’t Android Friendly

By: drubin

drubin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:48:39 +0000

@Gustav: Thanks for replying!! Really nice to have people involved read your blog.

Looking at other IM clients seems like a reasonable thing to do. The general IM thing would be not to exit/log out unless the user explicitly selects the menu logout/exit. Back/Home never exit IM clients.

“but I suspect it would have confused more users.” Confuse android users or QA/Market team that aren’t android users? ;-p

Since you are commenting I will give another one of my suggests if you don’t mind?

1) Since android has all these nifty features like account sync. See Facebook/Google apps. It would have been kinda nice to have MNxit had this feature as well. The ability to import your mxit contacts into your contact list.

2) Since permissions aren’t an issue on Android like J2me, it would be nice to from your accounts “Find other mxit users from your contact list”. — This idea would drive the vial aspect but whether android is a big enough market player in ZA? Might not make it worth doing just yet.

By: Gustav

Gustav — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:15:28 +0000

Thanks for trying our client. We had to pick one button for logout and one for “minimize”. We picked back (with a confirmation dialog) as logout, since we had the same idea as nnonix that was the way most Android apps behaved. We did not look at any other IM’s on Android when we did MXit. We rather looked at a general Android Apps. Guess we could have done it the other way round, but I suspect it would have confused more users. Shrug.

By: drubin

drubin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:42:32 +0000

Hey nnonix

I am comparing Mxit to the other IM clients for Android. They seem to behave the way I expect them to . They all background the application when pressing the back button.

Also it is another convention AFAIK that android apps don’t exit when you press the home back key. This just pushes the Activity to the background but means that applications start up in the same state you left them last

By: nnonix

nnonix — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:08:28 +0000

There are lots of Android apps that work this way. The back button will work appropriately as long as there is a command history, otherwise it will exit the app. Using the Home button while the application is running backgrounds the app.

Personally I like this behavior (except when it exits without warning) because it negates the need for a task manager.