In fact what Google is doing is fantastic. They provide the tools to make your app have different layouts on different form factors.
But only as long as what you're laying out looks and works the same on every platform and gives good results in all cases.
We used to have this issue in desktop software development. MS and Apple had quite different UI standards for their respective platforms, and if you just naively ported an application from one OS to the other without considering the details then it just wouldn't feel right in a hundred little ways that added up.
The current trend for trying to homogenize native mobile apps, web apps, desktop apps, and anything else we can call an app, seems like a retrograde step. It makes development cheaper, but different platforms are useful for different things and they are used in practice in different ways. There is way too much hammering square pegs into round holes right now.
Ironically, Google's own sites are often excellent examples. Analytics, for one, is literally unusable on various tablets (notably iOS ones using mobile Safari), because they've tried to be too clever with standardising their look and feel instead of using native system controls. What they've actually done is cause a bunch of content not to even appear in the viewable area and broken the normal idioms for basic interactions like zooming and scrolling that would otherwise have fixed that.
But only as long as what you're laying out looks and works the same on every platform and gives good results in all cases.
We used to have this issue in desktop software development. MS and Apple had quite different UI standards for their respective platforms, and if you just naively ported an application from one OS to the other without considering the details then it just wouldn't feel right in a hundred little ways that added up.
The current trend for trying to homogenize native mobile apps, web apps, desktop apps, and anything else we can call an app, seems like a retrograde step. It makes development cheaper, but different platforms are useful for different things and they are used in practice in different ways. There is way too much hammering square pegs into round holes right now.
Ironically, Google's own sites are often excellent examples. Analytics, for one, is literally unusable on various tablets (notably iOS ones using mobile Safari), because they've tried to be too clever with standardising their look and feel instead of using native system controls. What they've actually done is cause a bunch of content not to even appear in the viewable area and broken the normal idioms for basic interactions like zooming and scrolling that would otherwise have fixed that.