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Devs Bet Big On Android Over Apple's iOS
CWmike writes "A majority of mobile app developers see Android as the smart bet over the long run even as they vote for Apple's iOS in the short term, according to a survey conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC. The survey polled more than 2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native apps. Of the 2,300 polled, 59% said that Android had the 'best long-term outlook,' compared with just 35% who pegged Apple's iOS with that label. But three out of four said that iOS offers the best 'near-term' outlook, with 76% tagging Apple's operating system as the best revenue opportunity."
speculation is shit. who cares...
This is not really a surprise considering it is the only mainstream open platform not tied to any particular hardware.
Apple users are used to paying for costly proprietary applications, so of course there is a better revenue opportunity. I just find it so disgusting that there are so many developers all of a sudden interested in making money from their code. It seems Apple is doing more to destroy the environment created by the open source community than any other company...
35% of mobile application developers are FUCKING RETARDS.
So among cross platform developers, just over half said one platform was better than another.
Talk about sampling bias. This just in, 70% of AppleInsider users think iOS is great, and 99% of lactose intolerant people think Ice Cream suck
big deal.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
While Apple's market is very dynamic, and quick to adopt new products (even when very expensive), it is unfortunately a very small market overall. It's estimated that roughly one in ten people are homosexuals, and only a small number of those people are hipsters with trust funds. So well over 90% of the population will have absolutely no interest in buying Apple's products.
We've seen this trend with most of their other offerings. Mac OS X has never managed to exceed around 2% to 3% of the consumer personal computer market (that is, we're not even counting large corporate purchases). It's just how Apple's markets work.
...considering that I just bought this Droid X that I'm posting from :)
Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't this effectively a survey of people who are undecided? After all, isn't that why they're using a cross-platform kit rather than writing right to Android/iOS?
I would think looking at the developers who have firmly committed themselves to a platform as a better metric. The uncommitted developers have nothing to lose.
Android will be more popular in the long run for one simple reason. Cost...
This will play out like the PC clone wars. The vertically integrated and expensive manufacturer will be buried by the clones and their common OS.
Now I'm an android user, and I'm registered to dev on both iOS and Android (with pet projects for each), but the set sampled in this survey is anything but statistically sound.
Cry over your Starbucks Hipster Douchebags.
Enjoy your inevitable market-share irrelevance. Again!
LOL
Android ports of our existing iOS apps are unlikely, at least until the NDK is complete and native apps allowed.
Porting once to Clutter via the C API would be the preferable route, assuming it's as widely supported as it deserves to be. Google are including clutter in their Chromium OS so there's hope for the future even if Android and it's Dalvik VM continue to suck.
I took a poll among the neighborhood wooofers. The overwhelming consensus is that cats are bad news, good-for-nothing waste of cat food.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
with 76% tagging Apple's operating system as the best revenue opportunity
translation: where you can even sell an app that does nothing but make fart sounds
LOL! You actually think anyone gives a fuck about your iPhone apps???
Get a clue dipshit.
Unfortunately, it doesn't have anything to do with what developers WANT to do or WHERE they prefer to program, because at the end of the day (for most developers) it all boils down to making some sort of income on the work they do. To do this they have to go where the customers are spending money on their apps and/or where the customers are viewing their ads.
Instead of believing articles like this, I think it's wiser to find a particular niche thats lacking on a mobile device or find something that can be implemented better and create it. If your app fulfills either of these scenerios, then you will make a profit.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
I think Apples walled garden approach may result in more per-user spend. But that's about it. A many times larger user base, I don't see Android's market share plateauing until it is many times that of iOS. It always makes sense to target the larger user base as a starting point (but only as a crude rule of thumb of course). This is a repeat of the Mac vs PC era and again Apple is just to selfish.
However, this time the OS competing with the Apple camp is *really good* and Android is so far ahead of everything it's not funny. Apple is being forced to eat humble pie and add features that Android pioneered and thus demonstrated Apple was wrong about, it's gotta be a sign.
Oh and the Android development community is fscking awesome.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned jqTouch. When coupled with phoneGap, you get an incredibly powerful *platform independent* combination. This is why the web was developed. People who try to force you to exchange free information through proprietary technology that you must pay to use should be shunned.
The biggest PITA isn't the whole app store process etc. its the fact that developers cannot:
a)You cannot make your own dynamic libraries, only static ones(though the OS obviously supports it, you can include any of Apple's own dyilibs in your project) I don't need to go into why dynamic linking is much better than static....
b)There really isn't a clean way to talk between applications. You can send files, but it's really a drop box, I can COPY(not link!) something into another apps area, but after that the file is no longer mine. So if I want to send something to another app to process and then get it back to do some processing by my application I have to hope the app tells me about the changes, and considering the app may not even know I exist(nor should it, thats the beauty of decoupling), thats a lot to ask.
I can *sort* of understand 1 from a performance standpoint, if you allow user created dynamic libraries every time the application is swapped out of memory you have to find which dynamic libraries it uses, make sure nobody else is using them, then unload them. However as memory increases the rationale behind needing to constantly load/unload them starts to disappear.....
Maybe Apple will change it's tune, but long term I think you will be able to do more interesting things with Android because it allows for the creation of dynamic libraries and inter-application communication.
Monstar L
Any application worth it's bandwidth is going to go cross platform in time. Android has a lot of ground to cover and if the tablets get any real marketshare it will take off. I don't need a culture with only one or two platforms. This isn't 1982 where the home PC market had serious restrictions based on platform.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
It is obviously Sampling Bias.
And not:
* The fact that you have to go out and buy an otherwise useless and overpriced computer just to development for the iPhone
* The fact that you have to use a niche language no one other than Apple uses instead of industry standard Java
* The fact that your apps are at the whim of nameless Apple bureaucrats who have absolute control over when or if your app ever is made available to the market
* The fact that you get to work on the leading edge / most advanced cellphone OS on the market that is getting upgraded at an incredible rate compared to the outdated Apple cellphone OS
* The fact that you have a gigantic number of devices to select from instead of a single defectively designed one from Apple
* The fact that Android is roughly doubling its growth rate ever quarter and is now the top selling cellphone OS at a rate that was around 72 million devices a year months ago and certainly much higher now instead of Apple's iPhone which has lost marketshare to Android for the second straight quarter
Yeah, it's gotta be 'sampling error'...
Most Android devices are more locked down than any iDevice. The ones that aren't tend to be more expensive than the equivalent iDevice. I'm actually surprised Google hasn't worked with Chinese manufacturers to make sure some cheap Android devices weren't more developer friendly. I'm not sure why these cheap devices aren't more friendly since the manufacturer isn't making any effort to benefit from the closed state of the devices.
I think Apple needs to be more clear in why they do or don't reject apps and it shouldn't be for political reasons. If there is a technical reason they should be clear on why and be open to change as the devices become more powerful or developers suggest workarounds. If there is a business reason (such as not allowing smut) they should be clear that they think it'll give the best experience for end-users. If anything though I think Apple should be more strict about maintaining quality. They need to make all apps pass a vigorous quality test that checks for stability, security, ease of use, and simply delivering what it claims to. Customers have to trust that when they buy an iOS app it won't suck.
Stealing functionality is a hard issue. If it makes the base better then they need to do it but if it's really anything novel they should compensate the app developer. Even if it's not really novel but well done they'd be foolish not to at least hire the developer. What better way to find the best people to develop iOS? Likewise they'd be stupid to crush the jailbreak community. It's much better to hire the best from the pool of developers there.
Of course for the most part none of this really matters. The more difficult it is to distribute iOS apps the better for the developers that stick to it so long as Apple maintains good sales and iDevice users remain more prone to spending money than Android users (who are actually pretty negative about paid apps). This is a good reason for maintaining strict quality controls. Users will be more willing to buy and there will be less noise in the system to keep people from finding and buying your app. It doesn't matter how easy it is to develop for Android if you're not going to make money doing it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
When you're on the top, the only way to go is down. While iOS isn't the zenith of smartphone computing worldwide (Nokia is), it has a lion's share of the market and is expanding tremendously daily. The only problem is that people are fickle, especially when it comes to electronics, and with Android catching up quicker by the quarter, Apple's long-term strategy is definitely a good bet to hold on to.
Now, Apple isn't going to disappear in the smartphone space any time soon. It would have to do something incredibly stupid, or get trumped by something incredibly and undeniably better (iPhone 4 is really tough to beat), for that to happen. However, Android certainly has the potential to become the de facto alternative mobile platform, which is just as good with a market as wide as this. If they can make significant inroads into RIM and Nokia's space while putting Windows Mobile out of the picture for good (which they are certainly capable of), there's no doubt on my mind that this will happen. As an added bonus, it's barrier to entry for application development is pretty low and very cross-applicable (at least in the most trivial sense -- Java is used in so many other places whereas Objective-C is not).
As someone else said on here a few days ago, is it possible to have an entire article rated as Flamebait?
Wow im shocked, developers that are trying to cater to both and likely started on the android hope android wins. I have no leanings either way, imho they both have their pluses and minuses but if your going to do a survey should people that are actively involved in a platforms development beyond a cross compiler be at least sampled? This reminds me of the AdMob survey back in march that claimed 70% of iPhone developers were jumping ship while surveying only 108 hand picked participants, oddly enough it was the same week that Apple announced it had passed 100,000 licensed developers. I've been dabbling with android itself, but frankly until they can get their act together (3-4 different versions in the wild, poor upgrade paths from oem's, google denying marketplace to non-phone devices) I really don't think Apple has much to worry about. Yes Apple is draconian as hell in their licensing, contracts and at least IMHO rather greedy on the profit sharing but at least there is some organization and direction.
about Android. If you have brand x phone and I have brand y and you have a cool app, will it really work on my phone with a different processor, screen geometry, camera, sensors, etc? Cause if you have an iPhone and I have an iPhone I know your killer app will work on my phone and I'm past the helping-the-tech-along part of my geek life. I'm ready for the just-gimme-the-kick-ass-shit-that-works part and I'm willing to pay more for the convienence.
If You don't want AT&T, you cant get an iPhone (without jailbreaking etc.), so even normal people (non nerds) are going with android....And loving it...
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USERS paid developers over $1 billion, and Apple snatched over $300,000.
iOS developers get 70% of revenue from app sales, Apple gets 30%. 30% of $1 billion is $300 million (not $300,000).
I believe it. This is what Steve Jobs does and has always done.
He builds something great then ruins it with his extremely controlling flaky freakout attitude towards the world.
Nothing new here.
Uh, users of a cross platform compiler prefer to keep their options open and prefer more open solutions. Duh. What percentage of the *total investment* is going towards iOS vs Android? How much money is each group making off of each OS? This "survey" is about as useful as doing a survey of Linux users for desktop app trends would have been back in 2005: a complete waste of time and electrons.
Rip out the jvm and allow first class native code and I might think about it. It is impossible to port any of my iphone apps to Andoid and get a playable frame rate. I love the fact that Android runs a linux core but I refuse to code with one hand tied behind my back.
Got Code?
How much would it cost said developers to market their apps without a central App Store? How much would they pay in credit card processing fees? How many apps would they have sold if Apple hadn't allowed third party apps? Apple enabled developers to make a load of money. Sure the users paid the money but Apple has done a lot to enable developers in a market that prior to the iPhone was very limited. Did you ever try to write and distribute a mobile app before the iPhone - it was all but impossible to be successful at.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The /. front page this evening looks like The Register this morning.
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
Objective-c is Apples attempt to co-opt developers
Objective-C never was a developer lock in, it is merely used by the API for the operating system. You have always been free to use C/C++ for your application's code. Whether the OS API is objective-c or C/C++ doesn't really matter, such calls are rarely portable to begin with as they are generally platform or hardware specific.
in my experience.
To this day I don't understand why they are so popular--or why the perception is that they represent better "software engineering".
This does, of course, suffer from a self-selection bias. People who use a cross-platform compiler have already decided that they want to play in both fields. All this does is find out their reason why. Which is interesting, make no mistake. To round out the picture, however, you'd have to at least get the number of developers who target one platform exclusively or use other cross-platform tools.
With my own dabbling in iPhone development and a friend who does that plus android semi-professionally, my own take is that the iPhone "peak" is getting ever smaller, to get into the top apps that make money like a printing press is getting ever more difficult. However, people usually underestimate the long tail, which feeds quite a lot of developers. It's not as exciting, but it works well especially for small-time and indy developers.
The same goes for android as a whole. I don't see nearly the same exposure for any android apps as is common for top iPhone apps. Less peak, more long tail. There is a marked difference in willingness to pay, however. At this time, as far as I can gather from people I know, android development isn't very profitable. But the growth rate is good, so that may change.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I just find it so disgusting that there are so many developers all of a sudden interested in making money from their code.
You mean like the entire proprietary marketplace?
It seems Apple is doing more to destroy the environment created by the open source community than any other company.
Well if it was that easy to destroy open source then proprietary software would have done it a long time ago.
That the carriers get to decide which features are available, what hardware, if an API will actually work, and every other little thing; and that the carriers are luddite, greedy scum; means I will not be developing on Andriod at any point in the near, and possibly far, future. The support issues alone are enough to dissuade me.
These are developers making freebie apps based on web standards.
Personally, I use iPhone myself, but I have Android and am looking forward to getting Windows Phone 7. When I write apps, what's interesting to me more than anything else is my ability to port the basics and write the app around them. On a Java based platform, my hair and fingernails itch just thinking about porting tens of thousands on lines of C++ code to a platform which doesn't guarantee a processor type. I don't mind screen resolution as I do as much as possible with OpenGL as I can, but screen format is a problem. I don't like the aspect ratio problem.
I know my cost of development for iPhone is SUBSTANTIALLY less than for Android as I have all models of iPhone and will probably only need to buy one per year to support it. Testing on all models is pretty easy to do. Android on the other hand is more of a hackers platform where you write it for the phone you have and if it works for someone else... great. If it doesn't, well, you'll need to get another phone to test with. These phones unlocked range from $200-$1000 and for any decent level of quality control, you'd need at least 20 of them today with people testing on all of them. In another year, you'll need a lot more. When Android is shipping on x86 hardware, then you'll need to make your code compile for both x86 and ARM which isn't that big of a deal except for alignment issues, but still then you're maintaining two executables and you have to buy even more devices.
Android doesn't guarantee :
- Screen resolution
- Graphics processor
- CPU type/generation/feature set (vector unit)
- Audio chip
- Audio latency
- Input method
- Multi-touch vs. Single touch
- Keyboard type.
- OS interaction with running applications
So, for anything more advanced than the basics webby kinda stuff, Android is a nightmare.
Cost of development for Android (with some QA) is MUCH higher than for iPhone.
The key is to write the application for iPhone, Android AND Windows 7 and leave it up to your paying customers to decided which one you'll focus the most QA on because of the best profit stream.
If you're starting from scratch on a new app, I guess it doesn't matter that much, you can work around it by using MonoDroid, MonoTouch and Windows Phone 7 SDK. With some work you can port most of your libraries to a CIL assembly. C++ doesn't port so smoothly there, but it's not that bad either. I am hoping that Mono eventually becomes the champion of phone development. It seems well on its way.
Google Voice was a good example. At the time it was developed, it offered unlimited texting, which duplicated core functionality, which of course is listed in black in white the agreement.
You state this as if this is a defense.
The agreement is the problem. It is what gives them the opportunity to reject your app in the first place.
The agreement is what makes the platform hostile to developers. Apple reserves the right to own a piece of functionality. Even if you do it first, they can reject updates to your app after they put in the functionality themselves.
Given that 95% percent are accepted without any issue at all, leaving only 5% of questionable apps, the argument that Apple is rejecting apps willy nilly is not exactly a good reflection of reality.
This is a pretty strong argument for Android in and of itself. If Apple is only rejecting 5% of apps, then I don't have much to lose by going to a platform where no apps are rejected, right?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Gee, you poll people using a cross-platform toolkit and they anticipate a potential shift in market shares and value? Maybe the fact that they are using _a cross-platform toolkit_ already is a bit of a pre-selection? Naaaahhhhh..
Indeed, there is some major selection bias going on here. Really, all this poll tells us is that they found out that developers who hedge their bets tend to think that it's a good thing they're hedging their bets. The fact that they are using this compiler backs up your idea that they were probably Android developers first and foremost, since they couldn't have been using a cross-compiler like that for iOS up until very recently.
I know it's popular to love to hate Apple lately, but the simple fact is that the majority of apps are rejected because the developer took a chance and ignored the agreement.
Maybe you should consider for a moment that the "agreement" is chock full of freedom-restricting, control-freak bullshit.
Okay I know Steve lives in his own world of facts and figures, but in the cited article, Steve says he's paid "$1 billion to developers." Now, semantically speaking, it means exactly that, that they paid $1 billion. That means that users would have paid Apple $1.43 billion or so. Then take 70%, and you have $1 billion paid to developers. If you think Steve is doing stat manipulation, and he's been known to do that, then please site your source. Don't try fighting this argument with math and semantics because you will lose.
And you lost big time when you site apple took "$300,000". Yes I'm sure you meant $3 million. Apple takes 30%, not 3%, and there's that thing called the "millions" before billions. If you are going to try this, please get that number right so it makes it seem like you know what you are talking about.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
The survey is of developers using Appcelerator Titanium, a cross-platform development tool whose whole selling point is that you can use it for different mobile platforms. So, obviously, that's a place where you are more likely to find people that think the currently most popular app market is the best short-term target but something else is more promising in the long-term, since a big the whole appeal of the development tool over platform-specific tools is that it allows the developer security if they don't think the current best target platform is also the long-term best target platform.
If you polled developers who use a iOS-specific dev tool, you'll no doubt find higher numbers who think iOS is the best in the long-term, and if you survey developers who use the Android Eclipse-based dev environment, you'll no doubt find higher numbers who think Android is more attractive in the short-term.
I believe this is wishful thinking, and here's why:
1) Existing install base. iOS is still the leader by a large margin, and concentrating on what *might* be a larger market n-years in the future is an unnecessary gamble.
2) Hardware specs. The set of available hardware/software configurations is much smaller for iOS than for Android. This means higher development time and/or costs for Android than iOS, all else being equal.
3) Vendor customization. iOS' lead becomes even more dominant when compared to a specific version and revision of Android, not to mention any provider-specific customization/crippling of features. When you add in vendors that make it difficult or impossible for users to upgrade their OS, you have a losing proposition.
4) User experience. The single biggest complaint for iPhone users is the network, yet there's little empirical evidence that AT&T is really any worse than T-Mobile, Verizon, or Sprint. To me, the key point here is that iOS is being taken for granted, which is about the highest accolade an OS can receive.
I am NOT saying that Apple is perfect by any means. Objective-C is an unwarranted departure from the industry-standard of C++, Xcode appears to be Apple's best effort at confounding potential developers, and the approval process is about two bits away from opaque. But even with all that, they still provide both the largest market and the path of least resistance for developers overall, and I'm not seeing anything from Android to suggest that's going to change anytime soon. There will be no unified vision for hardware, because both vendors and OEMs need to compete. Even if Android overtakes iOS in sheer numbers, the issue of disparate hardware will continue to plague both developers and potential customers alike. Ideology may favor Android, but ideology doesn't pay the bills.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You do know that if you want to deploy to a non jailbroken Apple device you need a license, do you? It's no surprise that there are 100'000, Apple basically forces people to become a licensed developer or jailbreak.