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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."
Given the way that Apple treats 3rd party devs and the locked down phone, it would be very surprising if Apple keeps their loyalty without making a major course correction. Those dick moves like randomly rejecting applications and stealing functionality out of apps for the base system isn't really endearing them with the people they need to keep the appstore vibrant.
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...
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.
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.
Apple obviously never thought of that.
Rejecting apps is only the tip of the iceberg. Objective-c is Apples attempt to co-opt developers. This has backfired. Developers like freedom to own what they make and not be locked into a solution. I can use C,C++ and java on any desktop system really easily. Rejecting apps is all part of Apples attempt to lock you in. Conform or die. Resistance if futile.
Apples attempt to assimilate developers will fail.
You do realize that Apple has paid out over a billion dollars to developers? I always enjoy these off the cuff statemetns about how poorly Apple Developers are treated when the simple fact is, that it is a lucrative market, which is why 3 of 4 still plan to develop for it in the immediate future. (ref: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20007010-260.html)
Assuming they create a good product, they are treated very well, getting an instant distribution model that functions at break even. Not a bad deal at all.
The simple fact is that a huge majority of apps are approved within 2 weeks. Of those that are rejected, almost unilaterally they violated the developer agreement, and then complain about it after the fact. 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.
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. I will grant that some of these rejections seem a bit stupid.
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.
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.
USERS paid developers over $1 billion, and Apple snatched over $300,000. Saying Apple has paid $1 billion to developers is like saying VISA has paid companies $1 zillion dollars. Nice try, Steve Jobs!
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
Just like those evil retail stores. I hear they buy the product for less than they sell it!
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.
I don't think your memory is very accurate. I think you are confusing the Lisa with the slightly later Macintosh product line. I don't think Jobs had any hand in the Lisa product.
Were "hackers" ever their "core audience"? Business had long embraced the IBM PC by the time the Mac was available - that market was "lost" during the Apple II days.
Lawsuits are often of little value, but the licensing agreements between Apple and MS were certainly vague over MS's use of various Apple IP and it is certainly was not clear that either side would have eventually prevailed if they had not gone to court and then finally settled all outstanding issues in 1997 when Jobs came back.
I don't doubt Apple does, and will continue to make business errors, but it is difficult to argue with their current success in terms of profitability and market value. If you feel that you know better than the "unwashed masses" (which isn't really that hard to do), I would suggest you short some Apple stock and make some money if your doom and gloom predictions turn out to be accurate.
Looking at the title of the summary: "Devs Bet Big On Android Over Apple's iOS"
Then look at the statistics quoted:
Long Term: 59% Android, 35% Apple, and 6% other (undecided, supports both, or neither)
Short Term: 76% Apple
I hardly call that "betting big" on Android. Personally I'll "bet big" that Apple gradually relaxes out of its "walled garden" approach, Google will drift toward higher standards for its market place apps... and ultimately whoever designs (or supports) the shiniest phones will win. Slashdotter's sometimes forget, hardware aesthetics often are the deciding factor.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
> 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?
Basically, yes. For the same reason you can run the same Windows and Linux software regardless of whether your x86 CPU was made by AMD or Intel, and use 3D graphics regardless of whether the video chipset was made by AMD, nVidia, or Intel. Strictly speaking, native code compiled for ARM won't work on an x86-architecture device running Android... but as a practical matter, just about every Android device that matters financially to real-world developers has an ARM processor.
Ditto for frameworks. The "Android Fragmentation" problem isn't due to a need to write one set of programs that work with SenseUI, another set that work with TouchWiz, and another set that work with MotoBlur. It's due to the fact that SenseUI, TouchWiz, and Motoblur keep phone owners shackled to old versions of Android because every new version tends to catastrophically break the manufacturers' proprietary "frameworks" that nothing besides the manufacturer's own apps use, and every major new version of Android has introduced lots of badly-needed basic features that were missing from early versions, so being shackled to an older version of Android really, really sucks. That's why so many Android owners have mixed feelings about SenseUI in particular -- it's very pretty. When it's cutting-edge, it's great. It's shiny, cool, and pretty. But 3 months later, when the next major version of Android gets released that leapfrogs ahead of the version chained down by SenseUI, it's an ugly ball and chain that holds back the rest of Android from progressing until HTC gets SenseUI working with the new version of Android.
It is clear that the $1B is referring to the money users paid for the apps. Apple says that they paid it b/c it is given to Apple and then immediately forwarded to the developers.
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations..." -Winston Churchill
You might've missed the recent repeal of section 3.3.1. Apple now no longer requires applications to be written in Objective-C.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/09statement.html
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.
It's obvious you can read and count from your user name, but do you understand logic?
"Apple has paid $1 billion to developers." - is a half truth. That's maybe why the editor of the article put in the full sentence:
"And Apple has paid out over $1 billion to app developers (their 70% cut fo all sales)." (spelling error preserved so you could get a hardon)
Apple didn't 'pay $1 billion to developers' cause they're such nice guys. They did so because that's what the developers had coming to them. To put it in the context that they did it for any other reason is faulty and/or misleading logic.
is 100% correct so don't get your panties in a bunch.
*DrugCheese rants*
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
Hate to break it to you, but you can use objective-C on any desktop system really easily, too. I used to use it in Linux. It's been supported by GCC for nearly two decades. And it's easily integrated with existing C or C++ code. (you may say that the GUI calls are different, but that is true of Android, too: it is non-standard Java).
In other words, your rant is based entirely on imagination. Please learn some facts before ranting again.
Qxe4
Objective C is part of the main development environment of OSX. It is the main development language of OSX. OSX is based on NeXT and that used Objective C in the development environment too.
C++ extensions were only added to OSX due to Adobe not wanting to rewrite all their applications. Apple have been trying to kill off the C++ API (Cocoa) for years.
On a mobile device you can't realistically have numerous runtime environments just because developers are lazy. Android only really lets you code in one language, a Java derivative (or rip off if you side with Oracle) with some potential for native libraries.
What do you have against Objective C? it's a really nice language to use and some of it's useful syntax features have been lifted and put in .NET 4. Things such as named parameters, so you can see the names and values of parameters to a method/function instead of just values.
USERS paid developers over $1 billion, and Apple snatched over $300,000. Saying Apple has paid $1 billion to developers is like saying VISA has paid companies $1 zillion dollars.
Nice try, Steve Jobs!
No, users paid Apple and then Apple paid the developers. It's fundamental to how the App Store works.
Your post is like saying you directly paid MS for the Xbox 360 you bought at Fry's.
http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html#overview
Just about the only thing you will need to use the DalvikJava for is integration with the app system. Which you want.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Sure it's a decent number of apps given that there is something like a quater of a million apps, but its a small percent of the whole. These are also folks that broke the rules, not some innocent victim. Yes there are rare cases where an app is rejected for stupid reasons, but those reasons were spelled out in the dev agreement.
The sense of entitlement of some people these days is amazing. They agreed to the developer agreement, willfully break it, and then act shocked when they get their hand slapped. Then people come in here and say it's a 'HUGE' problem, knowing you created the problem. I hate to break it to you, but this is how business works. You don't get to write your own rules FOSS style when contracting with another business. The developer agreement is a legal agreement. You dont' get to change the rules on a whim. Shocking, I know.
I'm not surprised violations get through. There are over 200,000 apps in the store. When they find them, they remove them.
[Citation Needed]
There are, what, 12 core apps, each pretty specific in the function it performs. Apparently there are at least 200,000 other things you can do on the platform without bumping into that functionality. It doesn't seem that hard.
95% are compliant. Of the 5% that aren't, most knowingly broke the rules themselves. The others chose to delve into areas that are open to the whim of personal opinion, such as adult material, or 'obscene'. Guess what? If you design an little sticky notes app, chances are pretty rock solid it won't get banned for being obscene.
This isn't rocket science. Something those dev's who raked in a billion in cash have figured out. Don't try to cheat the system and you'll do fine. If you realize you can't pass up the chance to cheat it, then iOS is not for you.
It's really just that simple.
Objective-c is Apples attempt to co-opt developers.
Really? I thought Objective-C was Brad Cox's attempt to create a message-passing object-oriented extension to C in the manner of Smalltalk.