To many, the inclusion of a menu button on Android phones is a bit messy. After all, the usability of iOS devices is spot on without this function. It makes me happy to see that Google is encouraging people to move away from using the menu button as more devices more to Ice Cream Sandwich, and to use the action bar instead.
In the blog post,Tim Bray summarises by saying:
If I had to put this whole post into one sentence, it’d be: Set targetSdkVersion to 14 and, if you use the options menu, surface a few actions in the action bar with showAsAction="ifRoom".
Of course you'll still need to worry about those pre-Honeycomb devices, but Tim's post describes how you can handle this situations fairly easily.
As an iOS user, I always found the menu button on Android a bit clumsy. The removal of the button allows for a more consistent user experience on apps targetted at either platform, and that has to be a good thing for the end user.
Is there anyone out there who will actually miss the Menu button?
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