> providing a more integrated experienced typically brings a better user experience
Has it really? One of the reasons I originally signed onto the google ecosystem, was that they had their services split. My youtube was separate from gchat, which was separate from gmail. Now I don't use almost any google products, because I don't want everything linked back to one account. Whenever they do this, google half-asses the integration, and things end up in a weird state
Absolutely and without a question. You will find exceptions here and there where the integration was done poorly or ultimately didn't make sense but the idea around providing integrated experiences is eliminating friction. Smart phones are fast but switching from one application to another is incredibly slow. Yes it's easy and yes you can download special launchers to slightly improve this but the fact remains that switching applications runs the risk of an application being unloaded from memory, it requires typically several taps and possibly yet another initialization.
But what if it works together in the same app? Take Google Maps and Waze for instance. Waze is awesome for gathering social data around traffic whereas Google Maps had some of that but not nearly at the same level of detail. Google integrated the Waze data into Google Maps so now, in the same application, you have both. No switching required. No need to run two mapping apps (because, let's face it, Waze's directions were never the greatest).
Let's go in a different direction now. Android didn't natively support finger print readers when companies, such as Samsung, started to include them. Due to the terrible integration you couldn't use finger prints so much of anything beyond unlocking your phone and even then there were several security vulnerabilities around that very point. Now that Google has included finger print reading, natively, into the platform you can use it everywhere. It's no longer a weird, separate, nebulous thing.
Maybe those examples are not the best but the point is that you must always march towards less and less friction. Once your app is fast and good enough the next step is integrations into other apps / systems to decrease the friction.
I'm only focusing on UX. Sometimes that's UI. Sometimes that's APIs. Sometimes that's shell commands. UX covers a wide range of items from casual users to hardcore software developers.
The best UX typically wins. If the implementation is complex or not is immaterial.
Has it really? One of the reasons I originally signed onto the google ecosystem, was that they had their services split. My youtube was separate from gchat, which was separate from gmail. Now I don't use almost any google products, because I don't want everything linked back to one account. Whenever they do this, google half-asses the integration, and things end up in a weird state