I’ve noticed another anti-Android meme developing. This one is against Notification Icons, a feature that iOS lacks and I miss it quite a bit on my iPhone.

John Gruber:

Nevermind the Siri rip-off, what makes this so very Android is all that junk in the status bar in the screenshots.

Joseph Mathewson:

I had excluded Android because the good handsets […] had a status bar full of icons […]

I admit, a bar full of icons can be ugly. It reminds some of us of Windows’ pre-installed bloatware from PC manufacturers: having a task tray full of ugly icons that either do nothing or actively signal something is running that is probably taxing your system. In most cases on Windows, they are to be eradicated.

What’s unfair on Android is to assume those icons are “junk” and are not put there by the user. The screenshots gruber are linking to are pretty ugly:

Gross, but also that guy is running custom firmware (note the weird battery icon) and is clearly some sort of power user or l33t Chinese hax0r. Kind of unfair to say this guy’s hideous collection of icons is representative of Android. Chances are he uses all that junk.

Here’s what my status bar on my Nexus One looked like:

Not so bad. Occasionally it’d look like this:

What’s great here is that I can easily see: Dropbox is done uploading something; that App I downloaded is done installing; and I have unread messages in my Gmail account.

Other apps use the notification bar on Android in other ways:

Cycling tracking apps use it to put a notification up there so you know the app is running and recording your behavior. Navigation apps use it to let you know you’re still navigating in the background (Google Navigation even tells you your next turn).

CardioTrainer shows you your weekly calorie count with a badge, which was pretty motivating. Some weather apps put the temperature right there, so you don’t even need to open an app or slide down the panel to see it.

Even disregarding these uses, and many others, there’s one way that having icons up in the bar is unbelievably useful, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a fool:

Tell me, just by looking at my iPhone, how many notifications I have:

You can see that I’m listening to music, and you can see that I’m connected to Wifi and that I’m using Sprint.

You can’t see that I have unread email waiting for me. You can’t see that Tiny Tower is bugging me about restocking. You can’t see AppsGoneFree notifying me that my daily free app report is ready, nor that my girlfriend instant messaged me 5 minutes ago and I never responded. As far as I can tell when I glance at my phone: nothing has happened that I haven’t dealt with.

The old iOS problem of notifications simply disappearing once they’re off your lock screen hasn’t really been solved. Unless you’ve forged an incredibly strong bit of ambient awareness with your iPhone notifications, there’s a good chance you’ve pulled down that notification panel and been shocked by how many notifications are sitting there that you forgot about entirely.

Notification icons are useful. I could look at my Android phone and, at a glance, I could see what type of notifications are waiting for me. I don’t need to unlock it, and I don’t need to pull down the notification panel. I can just see them right there.

I could really do without the “Sprint” advertisement in my iPhone status bar (Android does this right: the carrier branding is hidden within the drawer) or a big “PM” or “AM” next to the time. That space could be used for some tasteful icons to let me know that my notification panel is full of stuff I haven’t paid attention to.

If that’s ‘junk’, it’s junk I want.