SDK Shoot Out, Android Vs. IPhone

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister delves into the Android and iPhone SDKs to help sort out which will be the best bet for developers now that technical details of the first Android smartphone have been announced. Whereas the iPhone requires an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5.4 or later, ADC membership, and familiarity with proprietary Mac OS X dev tools, the standard IDE for Android is Eclipse. And because most tasks can be performed with command-line tools, you can expert third parties to develop Android SDK plug-ins for other IDEs. Objective-C, used almost nowhere outside Apple, is required for iPhone UI development, while app-level Android programming is done in Java. 'By just about any measure, Google's Android is more open and developer-friendly than the iPhone,' McAllister writes, noting Apple's gag order restrictions on documentation, proprietary software requirements to view training videos, and right to reject your finished app from the sole distribution channel for iPhone. This openness is, of course, essential to Android's prospects. 'Based on raw market share alone, the iPhone seems likely to remain the smartphone developer's platform of choice — especially when ISVs can translate that market share into application sales,' McAllister writes. 'Sound familiar? In this race, Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux.'"

Comments

Google looks like Linux?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Android runs on Linux....

Re:Google looks like Linux?!

[Microlith]

Which is wholly irrelevant.

Until I can write apps for it that target the Linux environment underneath, or even replace the kernel, the fact that it is based on Linux is pointless. I can name a LOT of other phones that are Linux based. They're not open either.

Biased much?

[pez]

Whereas the iPhone requires an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5.4 or later, ADC membership, and familiarity with proprietary Mac OS X dev tools, the standard IDE for Android is Eclipse.

So I can run any CPU from any vendor, with any OS, and no familiarity with anything, to develop for Android? Cool!

Re:Biased much?

[samkass]

Yeah, almost all the metrics mentioned in the summary are irrelevant. Objective-C is something you can probably pick up in an afternoon. It's simpler than most modern scripting languages. And if you are unable to do so, as an iPhone owner I'd say please go write your app for Google anyway.

They mention ADC "membership" as if it's anything other than a free web sign-up. It's true that you need to pay $99 to be able to put the app on a real device, though. But in exchange for the $99 you get 2 incident reports in which you can talk to actual Apple engineers and access to a worldwide marketplace tied to the most successful digital media store in history.

And... in the end, there's really no SDK shoot out in the article. Which platform is, in the end, easier to develop for? Yes, Apple does a lot of stuff proprietary-- but is it better? Interface Builder is pretty frikkin awesome. The integration of the debugger and ability to run DTrace with a sweet UI remotely on the device is very nice. There are GL ES performance monitors, database monitors, etc etc etc. Yes, you can use Eclipse with Android and someday some developers might write plugins for it, but does that really make up for all these tools? I'm curious to find out. Someone should write an article...

Re:Biased much?

[Rik Sweeney]

Wow, what a treat we have today:

It's a Slashdot user with a 2 digit user ID, they're very rare.

OK, take some photos, but be very quiet in case you startle it. Don't point your flash directly at its eyes since it's probably unaccustomed to bright light and you might blind it.

When you're done, I'll be over there with the rest of the tour group.

Re:Biased much?

[Sloppy]

How are they going to prevent that? Either the machine is open, or it isn't. If it's not, then Google has been deceiving us.

Re:Biased much?

[samkass]

That's a good point and probably true, especially for developing for the Simulator. In fact even the helper apps (like converting to iPhone-preferred audio formats) are all command line tools. However, it seems like it would be a huge amount of work for little gain to unhook it from XCode, but I would be surprised if it couldn't be done once you figure out the zillion-and-one configuration issues.

I know we're all under NDA, but I've had very little problems with debugger integration. There's sometimes the frustrating unexplained BAD_ACCESS, but in general I can see threads, allocations, I/O, memory leaks, locks, allocations, SQL reads/writes/locks, OpenGL monitors, etc etc etc. I thought it was pretty impressive myself. Gotta love DTrace.

Re:Biased much?

[rockmuelle]

"...debugger integration is not really their strongest point."

You should really take a sideways look at the iPhone SDK. The debugger integration is solid and almost up there with Visual Studio for memory and thread debugging.

While xcode is technically just a wrapper on top of GCC, Apple has done an enormous amount of work to integrate all elements of the toolchain into the environment in a way that enhances developer productivity.

I used xcode when it first came out and was underwhelmed - it was really just a simple gcc wrapper back then. But, it's evolved significantly and makes the GNU tools it's built on actually efficient to use (think using the CLI version of gdb for debugging compiled, multi-threaded code on remote devices... sure, you can do it, but it's a time sink).

-Chris

Re:Biased much?

[thelexx]

Wrong.

Quoted:

For example T-Mobile will not restrict applications providing a work-around to the SIM lock feature or prohibit Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software, such as Skype applications, that come from the Android development community, according to Gartenberg.

"T-Mobile's CTO [Cole Brodman, who also serves as chief innovation officer for T-Mobile USA] told me that he while he can't say he'd like that to happen he isn't going to restrict it or stop it," said Gartenberg. "That's the spirit of how open they are to being an open platform and the fact they understand what it's all about."

Re:Biased much?

[xenocide2]

How do you prevent Skype? The same way you enforce SIM locking. The system is open, but you and I can only target the Dalvik engine. Modification at lower levels requires an open platform, and nobody wants to subsidize the price of a phone that you can unlock yourself and take to the cheapest competitor. You don't buy computers from your cable company, stop buying phones from your carrier. Hell, most of the carriers have sold off their networks to third parties to operate on their behalf. It shouldn't be long before Wal-Mart becomes frustrated enough with the carrier cartel and launches their own prepaid phones leasing access from these networks.

That said, I think the source the "no Skype" thing seems to be based on a question about whether Skype was available or not. It could be that Skype is welcome to write such an app but hasn't.

Re:Biased much?

[Sancho]

Ever programmed in Objective C? It's really an elegant design, and most developers seem to have no problem adjusting to it. Rather than thinking that it's unfortunate that Apple chose such an uncommon language for development, I think that it's unfortunate that Objective C hasn't gotten more acceptance outside of Apple.

Re:Biased much?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a Slashdot user with a 2 digit user ID, they're very rare.

You might say there's less than a hundred of them left in the world today!

Re:Biased much?

[lottameez]

I've been writing Objective-C for a few months now and I don't see the "elegance". I see the lack of garbage collection (at least on iphone dev) as annoying and nested function calls as hardly unique. Simple things like trimming whitespace from string requires goofy convoluted code.
newString = [origString stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]]
I've also found the documentation a pain to navigate (which may be why I'm not so keen on it).

OTOH, XCode and it's suite of profiling tools is indeed handy, and the debugging seems to work pretty well.

Re:Biased much?

[tyrione]

NextSTEP created Objective-C for their OS and API (which became Cocoa later on). So, it's not uncommon per se, it's merely created for that purpose. Although you can code on Windows with Objective-C (since gcc supports it on all platforms), without Cocoa it wouldn't be a seamless adventure. TBH I'd be surprise if anyone does any serious works with it outside of anything apple-related.

I develop with iPhone and OSX everyday and I agree Objective-C is a beautiful and well-designed language, but most of the fantastic experience of using it comes from the API part, not the language by itself.

Correction: Brad J. Cox Founder of Productivity Products International created Objective-C.

Object-oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach, by Brad J. Cox.

Brad later co-founded Stepstone and NeXT eventually bought all rights to Objective-C as they developed their own version, based on Brad's works.

Brad J. Cox's current info: http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/

The self-documenting approach to coding that Objective-C inherits from Smalltalk makes for understanding what the hell is going on, by design, more rapidly than traditional C++ jargon. Of course, for every single book on Objective-C/Cocoa there are one hundred C++ or Java tombs. Somehow, the sheer volume of repeated books has helped reinforce in the minds of those never programming in Objective-C that it's some quasi-exotic language that no one ever uses. That's changing in a large way. As the growth of OS X 10.6 and beyond becomes apparent, so will the growth of books published and developers exposure to both help learn and evolve the language where it makes sense.

Quite a bit of Java's design was grafted from ObjC, yet that C++ syntax of Java somehow gives people the notion it's a derivative of C++ alone.

Regarding the Frameworks of Cocoa and without them the language wouldn't be so elogant. The same is true for all programming languages. Without Trolltech Qt's Libraries C++ wouldnt' be so elogant. Without the overkill of solutions within Java the Java language wouldn't have become the Server-side standard. So on and so forth.

The only thing that matters...

[LibertineR]

is which of these damn phones is going to make its owner a better human being? I mean, that IS why we buy these things, right?

We buy MACs as conversation starters, PCs because we are depressed and dont like ourselves, and are gluttons for punishment.

Which of these phones is going to make me more attractive? Which phone will increase the size of my- er, um, bank account?

I dont just want a fuckin phone, I want a phone to provide solutions to Global Warming, AIDS and Fat People. THAT is the phone I want, dammit!

Hmmm...

[16K Ram Pack]

In this race, Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux.

It's more like Apple is taking a page from Apple's book and Google looks suspiciously like Microsoft.

For all their faults, Microsoft have always been more developer friendly than Apple.

Re:Hmmm...

[_Sprocket_]

Indeed, let us all be glad that Microsoft won the PC war instead of Apple. Jobs would have been worse.

It's more complicated than that. Although I agree with the general sentiment.

It wasn't so much that Microsoft won. It's more along the lines of IBM losing and Apple losing more. Or rather, IBM winning by losing and Apple losing by winning. IBM lost control of its platform which then became a commodity platform to take over the industry. Apple maintained control of their platform(s) and became marginalized players in a market they were a major part in creating.

Microsoft was, of course, a major part of this history. And their role tends to shift over the years. At first they were a key component in allowing Compaq to start the (legal) "IBM clone" market. They then shift to becoming the (or at least one of the very few) common factor to the new commodity market - gatekeepers who in turn begin to influence the direction of that market.

It should be noted that Microsoft's developer-driven focus is part and parcel of the overall market. Proprietary platforms were the old world (something Sun had to re-learn). Microsoft was operating in a commodity world - or at least, riding the wave of commodity hardware. That mindset was in stark contrast to Apple's.

Re:Hmmm...

[Free the Cowards]

What a stupid thing to say! Nobody had to "win". We had a perfectly good PC ecosystem in the 80s, with at least half a dozen viable platforms. That is what we should have today. Being glad that Microsoft won the PC war would be like being glad that the United States won World War III. Yeah, we won, but the world is still a poisoned nuclear wasteland.

very high level article

[trawg]

I actually RTFA because I clicked on it before there were comments, got to the end and went looking for the next page link - but there isn't one. It's pretty light on any interesting technical details - mentions some stuff about the IDE, the frameworks ("one is Java and the other is Objective-C") and ends with the same question everyone else is asking, at the moment - which will be better.

If you've payed any attention at all to both Android and iPhone development already there's probably not much in there you won't have picked up from casually reading bits and pieces. Unfortunately. Let me know when there's a nice in-depth article available!

Re:very high level article

[MBCook]

I read it too. It's a troll.

"Apple makes you use Apple stuff." Boo-hoo. Does that surprise anyone?

Android is more open. That's a given. That was a major design goal.

How about the real question: how well does the iPhone framework work for developing applications? I've heard it's very nice, and very similar to desktop Mac programming so it's an easy transition for Mac developers. How nice is the Android setup? It it easier/harder to make simple applications? More complex things?

How about an SDK shootout actually looks at at least the names of the functions you use and tries to guess if one is easier to develop.

This isn't a "shootout", it's more punditry.

Re:very high level article

[einer]

As a Java programmer who used to program in Objective-C, I can tell you right now Objective-C is easier, cleaner and nicer to program. It's dynamically typed, where Java tries to enforce static typing. GUI-wise, it's a total win for Cocoa. The widgets and controls are an order of magnitude easier to understand and use than Java's swing/awt/swt nightmare. My biggest complaint with OC is garbage collection (which is no longer an issue as of 2.0). Also, Java has a much larger community. For those two reasons alone, Java wins the mindshare, but if you're asking me which one I'd rather program in, it's Objective-C hands down.

Re:very high level article

[vadim_t]

How about the real question: how well does the iPhone framework work for developing applications? I've heard it's very nice, and very similar to desktop Mac programming so it's an easy transition for Mac developers. How nice is the Android setup? It it easier/harder to make simple applications? More complex things?

Well, see, for me it doesn't even make sense get to this part. It doesn't matter how nice the SDK might be when the reward for spending a not that small amount of money on the reqired hardware and the subscription, and weeks or months of my time on development could be having my application removed from the store, and Apple actually forbidding me from telling my customers what happened.

Now when Apple stops being stupid, then I will become interested in comparing them on their technical development merits.

Re:very high level article

[david.given]

GUI-wise, it's a total win for Cocoa. The widgets and controls are an order of magnitude easier to understand and use than Java's swing/awt/swt nightmare.

Um, you are aware that Android does not use Swing, AWT or SWT?

In fact, as someone who's actually written code for a bunch of different mobile platforms, including some proprietary ones (shudder, shudder, 20 minute build cycles, shudder), Android is an absolute dream to code for.

In essence, Android encourages applications to be data-centric; and the Android UI allows to to hook up a custom View of your choice to a real SQL backend via automatic cross-process IPC (which allows you to export data to other apps) in about 100 lines of well-spaced code. Compared to, say, Symbian, where you have to spend half your time thrashing through their documentation trying to figure out the lunatic memory management model and the other half waiting for it to build, it's simply so nice. Instead of having to spend all your time on trivial data management issues you can simply press ahead to the application logic itself.

(Not to mention that the Android tools work. The debugger just works, and honours breakpoints, which is more than you can say for Symbian's.)

(Also, as the Objective-C object model was blatantly stolen from Smalltalk, and the Java object model was also blatantly stolen from Smalltalk but with C++ syntax, there's actually much less in it than you might think.)

Re:very high level article

[jeremyp]

I agree with pretty much everything you say except the garbage collection part. Whilst Objective-C 2.0 does have garbage collection, the iPhone SDK does not support it. You're stuck with the old reference counting mechanism, at least you were in the beta that I tried out.

Re:very high level article

[_xeno_]

What? AWT - Depricated, SWT - 3rd party. Swing - Where the fun shit is.

Swing is AWT - or rather, built on top of it. And while Swing fixes a lot of issues with AWT widgets being essentially unusable (mostly by adding missing features - minor things like icon support, toolbars, tables...), it still suffers from the basic flaws that the AWT does.

So AWT most certainly isn't deprecated, even though no one uses it for GUI elements any more due to it's general crapiness.

SWT at least uses native widgets, but it's obvious they did Windows first and "everyone else" second. But it works fairly well and on a good number of platforms.

huh?

[Lumpy]

requires a intel mac?

dont tell that to my G5... it's happily working.

Apple looks like Apple

[vux984]

Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux."

No, Apple looks pretty much like Apple, and Android looks as much like Microsoft as it does Linux.

Cycle of Oppression

[hashax]

We have seen it for thousands of generations, the oppressed/rebel kid/cool dude becomes the oppressor. Apple is the new Microsoft. Pretty soon Google will be the new Microsoft, who knows what next.

What I do know is eventually it'll lead to by the law of natural selection the most oppressive organisation in the form of Skynet and mankind's only hope will be an Austrian Terminator (no no Summer Glau of Sarah Connor Chronicles is NOT a fighter type more like a japanese maid robot)

p.s. we do have to melt the terminator in the end just to be on the safe side

The phone's the thing...

[MobyDisk]

The iPhone is primarily an awesome hand-held phone, GPS, PDA, etc. Pre-loaded 1st-party apps are what make the device sing. The ability to get 3rd-party apps is a secondary benefit. Most people buying this device are using it for what it comes with. This will be the case more and more as the device becomes more mainstream.

I hope that Android phones don't focus on the development aspects first, and the 1st-party applications second. If the device has all the same nice features of an iPhone + is better to develop for, then great. But if it does not have the ease-of-use and functionality of an iPhone right off the bat, then it won't succeed.

Re:The phone's the thing...

[thammoud]

While I absolutely agree with you, it is a lot more important to initially get a phone with first class applications preloaded. Most normal users will not go hunting for "better" version of apps (Think Firefox vs IE). They will use what is installed. From what I am reading, the Android applications are of lower quality to those of the IPhone. This is very disappointing.

What about the market leaders?

[ncw]

It would be nice to see comparisons of the market leaders with development for iPhone / Android.

Based on raw market share, Symbian is the market leader (57%), followed by Blackberry (17%), Windows Mobile (12%), Linux (7%) and then iPhone (2.8%). Android yet to make a showing!

( Figures from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone )

I've done Symbian developement and there are lots of ways of doing it. Nokia's C/C++ API, Java or even Python. It isn't 100% open as in you can't have the source code of the OS, but the APIs are all documented and there aren't any restrictions on what your apps can do. If you want your apps signed it can be harder I'm told, but I've never tried that.

Re:App Level Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be joking. Comparing Javascript to Java in terms of 'nativity' or saying that C++ and Objective-C are 'slightly different' in 'trivial ways' betrays your lack of IT experience right off the bat, sorry ;-)

It's true that neither Java nor Javascript are 'native' compiled code in the traditional sense, but it's still not a fair comparison. Javascript's runtime environment is the browser which is (by design) very limited in the amount of access it can have to the underlying system, hardware, etc. Java's runtime environment, the JVM, on the other hand, can be arbitrarily privleged, and depending on how the OS is laid out, can do just about anything any native app can do (at a perhaps minor performance penalty). Seeing as they plan to have Android running on a bunch of different phones, the choice of Java is pretty much a 'must' if they want to have any sort of ubiquity as a 'platform'.

Also, Objective-C and C++ are quite, quite different. It would be easier to list their similarities than their differences -- they both have the basic goal of providing object-oriented facilities to C. That's about where the similarities end; C++ goes the route we've all come to know and love (hate), while Objective-C goes for a more pure "Smalltalk"-style message-passing paradigm. The similarities between the approaches are cosmetic -- the kinds of problems you run into in these two languages are quite different.
 
  Besides, the main difficulty in writing apps for the iPhone is learning Cocoa, not Objective-C. Most programmers can pick up new languages (even fairly unique ones) in a matter of days or weeks (at least to a passable level of competence), but a giant framework like Cocoa is hugely intimidating and often changing and much harder to find resources for.

Corrected Requirements

[UnknowingFool]

Whereas the iPhone requires an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5.4 or later, ADC membership, and familiarity with proprietary Mac OS X dev tools, the standard IDE for Android is Eclipse.

iPhone SDK requirements to develop an iPhone app:
OS X 10.5.3 or later (Intel or G5)
ADC membership (free but requires registration)
XCode (free bundled with OS X Tiger and above but not installed)
Objective-C language

To distribute iPhone app:
Yearly License: Individual $99 or Enterprise $299

Android:
Windows XP or Vista, OS X Tiger or higher, or Linux (tested on Ubuntu Dapper Drake)
Eclipse 3.3 or 3.4 (free download from eclipse.org)
Java JDK 1.5 or 1.6 (free from Sun)
Apache Ant 1.65 (Linux/OS X), 1.7 (Windows) (free from apache.org)

Good chart at engadget.

Users vs Developers

[David Gerard]

User interests beat developer interests, assuming that the first doesn't utterly cripple the second. And it does have to utterly cripple them to cause a problem.

* Every Wikipedia story, Slashdot commenters bitch about their experiences of participation. However, the site's still #7 in the world, so what's it doing right? Focusing on the reader.

* GPL (a user-rights license) vs BSD. Compare the popularity of Linux versus FreeBSD.

* iPhone vs Android. The best mobile phone interface ever. In this case, Apple is going further than anyone before in trying to utterly cripple developer interest - but if you can work an SDK then that many users is going to be attractive.

Openness will get Android a fabulous ticky-box feature list ... but, y'know, Windows Mobile has a fabulous ticky-box feature list, and no-one picks that instead of an iPhone if they have a choice.

Developer-friendly versus customer-friendly

[kscguru]

Sure, Android is more developer-friendly than the iPhone. Has Apple ever pretended otherwise?

Apple goes for something entirely different - being customer-friendly. Apple demands high-quality apps, and rejects substandard ones. Apple requires well-engineered user interfaces. Apple restricts the number of functionally equivalent apps and ways of doing something, to follow the well-known interface guideline of not overwhelming a user with choice.

I can already see how Google's Android is going to end up. Want a sneak peek? Go look at SourceForge today. Maybe 10% of the projects are extremely useful high-quality projects supported by a vibrant community. 90% of the projects are abandoned crap - but they're developer-friendly! You can get the source and fix it!

Being developer-friendly helps by making it easier to create software. That's a double-edged sword, however, because as much as developer-friendliness makes it easier to create good software, it also makes it two or three times easier to create crap software. Witness the plethora of Google apps that have never left beta, witness the gross proliferation of spyware and script-kiddie viruses, witness the rampant proliferation of me-too Linux distributions used by two people and their dog.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar. This is very simple - when I want something fun to play with, when I want to indulge my hobbyist sweet-tooth, I go to the Bazaar. When there's something I need to depend on and I don't have the time to tweak it myself, I go to the Cathedral. Now, in all seriousness, do you see a cell phone more as a fun toy or a necessary, must-work piece of your life? I imagine a lot of Slashdot readers want the cell phone to be a toy, but I also imagine most people in this world would prefer something to Always Just Work, even if it's less fun. It's the difference between driving a fun but high-maintenance sports car on the weekends and driving a reliable commuter car to work every day; everybody wants a sports car, but most people pick the commuter car.

Which means I don't buy the hype around Android. It's a fantastically wonderful toy, but Google's track record is that they do not have the discipline to enforce usability at the expense of their fun toys. And, to my great sorrow, that is Google's great weakness.

Java vs. Obj-C

[parryFromIndia]

Most of the article compares subjective/non-concrete things such as how many people use Obj-C and how many use Java. It misses on one significant aspect of the choice of language. Java opens up numerous possibilities for Android. In my opinion that was an obviously good move from google. Here is why -
1) Safety - Java provides a lot wider safety net than native language can ever.
2) Control - you can enforce the signing requirements in the VM for all code that is run or you can limit it as a requirement to only certain potentially unsafe APIs (RIM does this - you don't need to sign an App with RIM provided keys unless you use the more dangerous APIs.) This arrangement can generally give the user a lot more flexibility and control over what can and cannot run on the phone.
3) Exceptions are non fatal and possible recoverable, memory leaks are harder to induce
4) Verification of software is easier - API usage, control over how much memory is used, what network connections are made etc.

Before people complain Java is ugly and slow - this is J2ME (Java Micro Edition) that we are talking about which is much more lean and has different UI (Android UI doesn't look anything like the ugly Desktop Java and neither does RIMs - both use J2ME) These factors obviously matter a lot in a Cell phone type environment. I am especially happier with my Blackberry that it allows me to control what a Application can do or cannot do - make Wifi connection - No, access my address book - hell no, Access location - yes, Access Device Settings - no etc.

Not completely true.

[BSDimwit]

Not true... It can be made to work on PPC macs with a few minor tweaks and the assistance of Pacifist. What you can't do is sign apps so that they can be run on an external device(the app signer isn't a universal binary). I use the sdk at home on my PPC powerbook, and check the code into my subversion repository, then when on an intel based Mac, sign the apps and test on the iPhone. Not ideal, but its better than nothing.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Open for WHO?

[WiiVault]

Have you used a JME phone in a while? Let me tell you that native software is an order of magnitude faster on any phone I have used, be it Symbian or WM. When you have 200mhz to work with and lazy OS coders you can't afford the hit.