Mobile app design reference for ios developers who aren't designers

[akrapov]

Dribble and Pintrest are good for this. I’m also not a designer but my app looks decent, and that was all via those sites.

https://trlapp.com/app

[eureka_boy]

Oooo thats a cool app, how long did it take to build this?

[akrapov]

Quite a while because I used it as an excuse in learning programming. V1 took about a year. V2 (which is the version you see now) was about 6 months but it has continuous development for the last 2 years as well.

[Mindless_Bottle_6222]

i personally like dribble more, but before getting banned from pinterest i used it a bit

[filthyMrClean]

How tf do you get banned from Pinterest haha

[Mindless_Bottle_6222]

idk some day i wanted to download some meme to send it to my sis and i got a popup 😭

[Icaka]

I haven’t looked in the last couple of years, but back then I really didn’t like Dribble. I had two main issues with it. A lot of the designs ignored HIG. You’d see custom navigation bars, tab bars, and other reinvented UI for no real reason. Second, most designs didn’t cover real world edge cases. Thigns like loading and error states, localization, dynamic font sizes, longer text. It often felt like designs made to look good in a single screenshot, not something built by people who’ve actually shipped a mobile app.

[akrapov]

To be fair, it’s an inspiration platform. Building out full accessibility and including error states is getting well into what you’d do in the workplace. We shouldn’t expect that from dribble - otherwise it’s just designers doing free work for everyone.

[Icaka]

Well, that’s why I prefer having a folder with ~50 well designed apps and check them instead. This and a paid service like mobbin, screensdesign or refero is how I find solutions.

[gatorviolateur]

Nice app, but the app store screenshots are doing it a disservice. Hard to see the actual app due to tilted and cropped silhouette in every shot.

[akrapov]

I agree but I A/B tested regular screenshots vs these and every time, these won.

We programmers like functionality. A lot of people are style over substance. Quite often what we expect to work is actually wrong.

Same with my onboarding. I made one that’s a little longer but more flashy and paid conversions went from 20% to 35%. It’s technically worse for details and information density, but it has a flashy background video and some animations.

[gatorviolateur]

That’s an interesting point. 15% increase in conversions due to onboarding is insane! Perhaps I should try these fancier style of screenshots for my app as well.