Get it together, guys

If there is one thing that iOS and Android developers seriously need to come together on it’s a common standard for showing “my app is currently waiting for something to arrive from the internet”. I mean, half the time in Android all you can see is a tiny barely visible exclamation mark or something on the wifi signal strength meter. The spinner on the titlebar that seems to be the “normal” iOS one is at least slightly more visible, although I think we need something more visible when your app is actually blocking (as opposed to just filling stuff you can’t see yet). Some apps have taken it upon themselves to replace the “default” spinner (or lame exclamation point) with a much more visible one in the main screen – in the Facebook app on iOS it’s both, and they aren’t 100% in sync – but there is a lot of different spinners and throbbers in different apps, and it’s inconsistent and confusing. Then you get the god-awful flashing color bars in the G+ app on iOS. Please stop trying to be clever. Maybe if Android’s wait notification wasn’t so lame people would actually use it, and then at least we’d have some consistency. (It doesn’t help my case that Chrome on my iPad currently has the spinner up on the title bar spinning even though nothing is loading.)