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Why Developers Still Prefer iOS To Android
An anonymous reader writes "Google Chariman Eric Schmidt recently addressed an Android user lamenting the fact that that mobile apps are often released on Apple's iOS platform well before they finally reach Android. Schmidt cooly and curiously explained that this dynamic will change in just 6 months. Here's why he's wrong. Though Google brags about the total number of Android users, developers care about certain kinds of users (those that pay for apps). A similar dynamic can be found in television advertising, where advertisers will more money for ad spots on less popular shows in order to reach desirable demographics, even though other programs may have many millions of more viewers."
It's not only on television advertising, it happens with every kind of advertising. Internet, newspapers, magazines, even billboards. That's what makes both Google and Facebook advertising so lucrating and why Google is so desperately wanting to get their own social network - advertisers can directly target users with certain interests. Advertising to people with no interest about such things is useless. For example, Google has many advertisers targeting searches that might get searched only a few times a month, but when they do, advertisers are happy to pay more than $50 per click. They could get standard banner advertising to tens of thousands users at that price, but those are useless to them if it's a very targeted product or service. TV advertising mostly just works for brand names or products that almost anyone has use for. With internet you can target very specific people.
.NET. It is relative easy to port your games between Windows, XBOX360 and WP7. The same services are used for all platforms. And while the amount of users as large as Android or iOS, the users are paying for apps and is exactly the kind of crowd developers want. You also have less competition, so you can earn more easily.
Now the thing is, this targeting translates badly to applications and games. When user plays games, he isn't interested in anything else. It's completely different situation to some where the user is actively looking for something. This is why app developers make better money by selling their apps or games. However, Android users aren't as willing to spend as iOS users. They have even got used to the idea of getting their apps for free with advertising. But because advertising isn't really effective for such, Android app space in general suffers badly. On top of that you have to deal with fragmented devices and Google's ignorance regarding their app store. You can buy gift cards for iTunes, but you cannot for Android store, so you're out of luck if you don't have credit card. So you have an userbase with fragmented market, increased support costs, users without ability to pay for apps even if they had cash and the general culture that expects free apps with ads where ads just don't work.
The funny thing is that even Windows Phone market has comparatively more developers, apps and games. Microsoft has went at great lengths to make app developing for WP7 pleasant experience. They provide great tools, XNA, Silverlight and you can code with
If I had posted the OP verbatim, it would be -1 flamebait faster than you can say "troll."
Ah well... should be an interesting thread.
Why Developers Still Prefer iOS To Android
Is there something inherently better with iOS development? Is the API better written? Is there some technological inferiority to Android? Is it cheaper to buy the development tools for iOS?
Oh, I see. What you meant to say is:
Why Publishers Still Prefer iOS To Android
And even that's sort of not very accurate. I mean, there are plenty of apps that are free and are on both Android and iOS like advertising based apps that want you to read some website's stories. And they just want to target the most users, not the most users who shell out money. So maybe it should be:
Why Revenue Seekers Still Prefer iOS To Android
Not everyone developing apps depends on that as their revenue stream.
My work here is dung.
It's not surprising why app developers are betting on iOS over Android. According to the Flurry Analytics study, they make four times as much money on iOS. Developers are also concerned about fragmentation, the lack of store curation, and lower penetration of Google Checkout among Android users compared to iOS users, who are always payment enabled through their iTunes accounts.
Android's target demographic is hardcore techies combined with budget buyers unconcerned with smartphone quality. It actually makes very little money for Google, while iOS is generating obscene profits for Apple. Slashdot still fetishes marketshare as if it's the only metric that matters, but Android is actually like a whole bunch of operating systems with different capabilities.
Google should buy Qt from Nokia and use that toolkit as the basis for Android apps. It is already efficient as hell on smartphones (Meego and Symbian), and uses C++ as its programming language. No more worries about Oracle lawsuits, excellent programming environment. Mod this up.
This article doesn't discuss developers earning revenue from placing ads inside their applications.
And therefore, even if its conclusion is correct, its analysis is completely invalid.
For developers, that is. Android is a one size fits all approach, but not all Android phones can run all games, some are too weak. This causes developers headaches, bad reviews on their games, etc. And Android Market is not secure like iTunes, the apps don't go through a vetting process before they are put on the market, like iTunes does for their apps. So malicious apps are out there. Unlike iOS. Android is the new Windows... Sure it'll sell well, but Apple can give assurances on security, and the corporate sector will never adopt Android so it will remain the poor man's iPhone and the domain of geeks who can't face the fact that iOS is actually very good.
Now... flame away :)
I had a go at writing both iOS and Android apps purely out of curiosity. Although it was not difficult to program for Android, I have to say that writing for iOS was one of the easiest things I've ever done on a computer. If I were to seriously go into app writing for mobile platforms I would need a very compelling reason not to bet on Apple.
Android allows zero code and knowledge reuse, and no visual development tools. iOS and Windows Mobile at least allow plain C/C++ code. If you go with Java, implement a superset of J2SE (and get Oracle off your back). Nobody says that all classes need to be installed on the device until applications use them.
Phones are still sold with version 2.2 of android, 4.0 is now shipping. Faced with that, what could go wrong for developers?
It's real simple for me, Android is an awful platform to develop for (as are all the lowest common denominator cross platform API's). I have fun developing for iOS and really like the native API and developer tools. It's important for me to actually enjoy what I'm doing. I've definitely lost some projects because I don't offer an Android, but it's not really mattered since I have more work than I know what to do with anyway. Even after culling Android and only taking projects that really interest me, I still have to turn down projects because I'm already booked up.
Android is just not my cup of tea, if it's yours, then more power to you.
You know you're doing something wrong when RIM can claim (unchallenged) that the Blackberry App World is the #2 app store in terms of paid apps. #1 is, of course, Apple's App Store, but to have the #2 service be one from the #4 player is just... pathetic. (Windows Phone 7 is platform #3 after Android (#1) and iOS (#2)).
There are many reasons for this.
First, Google Checkout sucks. Yes, it does. When Android first came out, very few countries could access paid apps. As such, if you wanted to sell in the Google marketplace, you had to have free apps. The situation's better now, but you're still suffering from the fact that people found alternative ways to get paid apps for free. Google APKTor or the open-source counterpart.
Second is that it's too easy to pirate apps. Google's APKs aren't DRM'd, so what people do is they buy apps, rip them, then return them. 15 minutes is enough time for this, and if it wasn't, they can always return and try again later. Given that there are almost daily "New Paid Apps" torrents on your favorite torrent sites... After all, the iPad was dinged as "cannot run pirate apps".
Then Android users really don't want to pay for apps. I've seen some hardcore Linux users saying they'll never pay for apps - it should be FREE. Apparently, iOS users pay for 3-4 apps a month on average - Android stats are sketchier (C'mon Google - you just had 10B apps downloaded - how many of those were paid apps? Especially with the 10 cent deal?).
Third, well, the fact you have to use your phone is a major drawback. iTunes sucks, but at least you can download your app on your PC first then sync it over rather than have to leave your phone alone while it downloads hundreds of megabytes of apps. Many apps use SD cards (and full SD permissions) to get around this by having a downloader app go and download all the game assets and such.
Finally - fragmentation. Different screen sizes, different OS versions (a year after Gingerbread is released, it's on 50% of the devices. Which means roughly 100,000,000 out of the 200,000,000 Android devices run the what was latest and greatest OS. ALl the others run Froyo or prior (yikes). iOS has similar issues, but the number of people stuck at iOS 3 (only iPhone and iPhone 3G (iOS 4 doesn't run well so I'm not going to count it)) is fewer than those capable of running iOS 4/5, plus a number are upgrading. Ice Cream Sandwich will resolve this (Google's words), and maybe by tihs time next year we'll have 50% of Androids running ICS.
Then there's the black sheep - AOSP. Without access to the market, it has to use alternative marketplaces, bringing us back to piracy.
lets see... i have to use eclipse which is god aweful slow, and i still cant figure out how to get functionality to work even after reading the documentation and support forums. i.e. reverting to previous versions of a file. undo buffer is too small.
i cant debug C++ code at all.
often the adb manager loses connection with the phone
often the adb manager wont print out log messages from the phone to eclipse.
i have to use cygwin (dont mind since i typically install it anyway) but really it seems they couldnt do this without linux/unix.
i need a new usb driver from every manufactuer in order to use that device with windows.
thats off the top of my head....
From Schmidt’s perspective, it’s nothing more than a numbers game.
Nice strawman that they construct and then proceed to tear down, rubbish journalism.
Come on, we all know that the REAL reason devs prefer to code for iOS is because it's the only way we can convince the wife that we NEED that shiny overpriced MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.
The Wife Acceptance Factor.
I have both iOS and Android devices. The simple reason why I've purchased more apps on iOS is because the free equivalents weren't available as they are in the Android App Market. My daughter uses the iOS device (an iPod Touch) and I have a Droid2 and a Samsung Transformer. When she gets her phone it will be an Android device, likely a Samsung Nexus and she'll inherit the Transformer. So far I've spent about $100 in apps for the Android and that will likely grow because the tablets have proven to be quite useful.
My understanding is that there have been about 15 billion download under iOS and 10 billion under Android. However the more important number is that under iOS 2/3 of those are paid apps while under Android only 1/3 are paid apps.
As a developer I plan to support both iOS and Android. I design things to separate UI and core code, and the later is written in a highly portable manner using C/C++ to make additional platforms easier to target. However things like the above tell me to target iOS first.
I understand the "walled garden" concerns many Android users have but from a developer's perspective an unfragmented distribution channel (a single app store) is also attractive.
Although I might add that the hardcore android users are much more likely to view their phone as a tool rather than a toy, resulting in a lot fewer apps bought on a whim.
I'm the exact opposite. My game engine and various libraries (lua, box2d, etc) are all written in C++ / C, thus I have a single codebase that I build for both iOS and Android (and Windows and OSX). 99.9% of the code is shared - there are literally a few dozen lines of Javascript / Objective C that tie events at the app level into my game engine.
I greatly prefer to release for Android first, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to release for iOS version first. I can patch bugs and have a new Android build online and rolled out to my users within an hour or so. I can throw a new build straight to a user via a URL or email that they can upgrade to directly to check the fix (which is, for all intents and purposes, not an option with iOS having to deal with getting the user's device ID, generating a mobileprovision file, using one of my 100 device slots, etc, etc) With iOS my app has to go through the entire approval process again, adding at least a 1 week minimum delay before the bug fixes reach the users. It's far better allowing the Android users to give the game a thorough thrashing for several days to make sure there aren't any obscure or hard to trigger bugs, then roll out to the iOS folks.
Better known as 318230.
One of the primary reasons is ease of development, because the screen size and resolution of every iOS device is a know quantity. The primary thing that will be boosting Android development is Amazon's tablet, especially once it's user base exceeds the iPad's user base.
You scoff at them spending $20 on a pencil at an art store, they scoff at IT people spending $300 on a "server grade" hard drive they can get for $65 at TigerDirect.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
If I was going to totally through ethics out the window for the pursuit of profit as an "App" developer, I'd easily choose the Apple monoculture. Lets face it, Apple users are used to being free with their money; these people were, in a year that wasn't prefixed by "199", paying $40-60 for a bloody unzipping program. Now, these same people have paid a bloody fortune for a locked down phone and again for a locked down tablet which are both predicated on an "it just works, so long as you make sure you always buy the new one" monoculture, and attached their credit card they use for impulse purchases to it That's PT Barnum-level temptation right there!
So long as one doesn't mind paying for dev access and isn't interested in making programs that strain social mores and/or step on Apple's toes, once you've made it past the gate the walled garden I'm sure appears glorious. You don't have to worry about multiple hardware/software platforms outside the well-documented and very limited iSphere, you are assured your userbase has someone's money to spend, and so long as you abide by The Apple Way For Developers (tm) and kowtow properly to cocoa and objective C, you'll probably watch the dollars roll in.
Pretty sure I included you when I mentioned the hardcore techies. Folks like you are the only ones who "treasure freedom" and lash out angrily at Apple for daring to put constraints on your beloved software tweaking habits. You represent a minority of Android's demographic, with the rest coming from budget smartphone buyers.
Because that's how a business works?
Of course. Google shares those figures annually. Advertising is about 97% of their revenue, which is over $8 billion.
No, Google makes relatively little money from Android, and that's according to Google. I have no where you're getting the idea that they're making more money than Apple is from iOS, because that contradicts every hard number available.
If you plan to make money on your app via:
* Advertising
* Demographic data collection
you'll lean toward Android - more users, more support from Google, no interference from Apple.
If you plan to make money from people who pay for software, you'll go for iOS.
Schmidt may be right - "free" has a definite mass appeal.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
On my android devices, my iOS devices on the other hand have plenty of purchases, easily over a hundred dollars. Yes even smurfberries. Apple is right about the competition being "flummoxed", there is simply more software worth buying on iOS. Android has the hardware (I love my HTC Sensation), iOS has the Apps.
We publish on both iOS and Android and I can say without a doubt its a MUCH bigger pain in the ass to publish with Apple. Their processes for vetting applications, even updates, takes several days and they certainly don't work on weekends. It also took significantly (over a month) longer to get setup with an Apple developer account and the requirements in terms of legal documents are significant, to the point that my company had to go to the office of our Secretary of State to get some documents filed that we hadn't needed in more than 20 years of existence. In short, I can't see anyone who does freemimum or truly free apps preferring Apple and its certainly NOT a friendly environment for start ups. Interestingly the Amazon market is kind of a middle ground between the almost too open Android market and Apple's too closed (IMO) approach.
I know it's mostly off-topic, but
"Google Chariman"
"where advertisers will more money"
"And as for more Android smartphones released more recently"
etc, etc. And that's just what I caught at a glance.
Android users are cheaper bastards than the cheapest of iOS users.
I forgot to respond to this doozy. I don't know what the reasons are for your tribalist attachment to one smartphone operating system over another (surely an important thing to fret over in life), nor do I know why you're referring to me as if I represent Apple. You seem to have some kind of chip on your shoulder against a segment of the population, and frankly, you represent a type of annoying Android fan that has arisen in the last twelve months to become even more annoying than the stereotypical Apple fan.
As dramatic and dire as your prediction is, I can't help but point out that if the persistent man isn't making any money, it doesn't matter how long they stick around. Microsoft has proven this with countless floundering projects, from Bing to Windows Phone. Companies that make money last regardless of marketshare and even influence their industries, such as Nintendo.
You're seeing lawsuits from Apple because a large part of Samsung's business model relies on copying popular hardware and software designs to exploit customer confusion, as is obvious from a cursory glance between products, and low-quality products being confused with Apple products can end up damaging their brand in the long run. I'm not surprised at all that they'd file lawsuits--any reasonable company would.
I'll go ahead and let you "stay tuned," worrying about these things, while I just use what I like and get on with the business of living.
Seriously, you have to pay to develop with iOS? Has to be on a Mac? Do I have all this right? Do they make you pay for the IDE as well? I am a developer by trade, recently taught myself android 3.2 dev. Code wise, I have to say I do enjoy java coding (I get sick of bs web dev). Tool wise, it's pretty good in Eclipse. It's free. Maybe, since I am developing android as a hobby, I guess it just blows my mind that they don't open development on iOS to everyone, on any platform. Can I develop iOS in Linux, or do I have to use that scratch and sniff (Spring fart smell) Mac OS? Maybe Google should only allow android dev on Linux under a monthly subscription plan. Apparently boxing everything in and constantly charging, re-charging, and over-charging your user base (including development talent) is the recipe for success.
I'm developing on both Android and IPhone; started out on Android and now have extended my repetoire to IPhone.
The advantage but also disadvantage with Android is that it's very open-ended. Often you want to get a specific thing done and you end up alot of time bending the API to your will. (Oh tabview, why art though so...) Or bump into the limitations of your architecture and need to rework some things to get it running.(why does it crash on device x when I have two nested frameviews to have this design? Why doesn't it scale well on device y?)
The IPhone API takes more knowledge (how does that delegate call again and what object is stored where and how do I get a refernce to this?) but it's consistent. And the look is consistent. (which shaves up alot of time thinking about the GUI when trying to implement it.)
I'm an avid Android lover but I can appreciate the IPhone API as well.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Android's target demographic is hardcore techies combined with budget buyers unconcerned with smartphone quality.
Which will quickly massively outnumber Apple's demographic.
What would you base that assessment on? If that were true why would lInux, which had exactly the same combination of possible buyers (techies plus people seeking really budget computers) not have beaten Windows long ago?
It's amazing to me that so many computer literate people here are utterly unwilling to see the impact that software has on the platforms people chose to use.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You appear to have forgotten that suits arising from the alleged copying by Sammy were dismissed. In fact, pundits were quoted as having said Apple were given a taste of their gravy, by a dress-down.
Please address this. I am interested.
It's all about the fact that casual purchase on iOS takes ... 20 seconds? Casual purchase on Android takes ... 20 minutes? I've timed them.
And sometimes I'm a casual user. Anybody who has any experience on what mobile apps industry used to look like 10 years ago* (and don't be mistaken - there was one and really powerful one) simply cannot ignore the simplicity Apple ecosystem has brought to table.
*Remember Siemens SL45? That little thing with J2ME and MP3...
Which imaginary developers are these that thing the hassle and expense of XCode and iOS programming is better than the free one-file setup of Eclipse and Android programming?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
>> A similar dynamic can be found in television advertising, where advertisers will more money for ad spots
The problem is : users just do not want ads. Remove ads altogether.
The same applies to mobile tech. _Users do not want to pay for any "app". Most do not pay anything extra than their cellphone plan. Just find a business plan that fits that, and most users are ok. If we need to pay anything, just forget about it, it will not work on the long run.
I'm serious.
aaaaaaa
We *don't* prefer iOS. And we definitely don't prefer Apple being able to just reject our six-figure 3-6 month project because the "moon is just not right today".
We only know that IDevices are usually used by total retards that can be tricked into giving all their money to *everything*. Even imaginary property. Even $500 "apps" that do nothing else than show that you paid $500 to get them, so you can brag about it.
This is NOT an article. This is a deliberate piece of social-engineering propaganda (otherwise known as a "opinion piece" in the USA) with a deliberately suggestive headline that wants to make us think that something that is mere wishful thinking by the author's sponsors, is actually a general fact.
It's social engineering 101. You learn that in the first hour: Replace the target's reality with a reality that causes the target to think and act in a way that furthers your goals. Do it by assuming your designed reality has been, is, and will always be how reality is, and that everybody has always thought this way. ("We have always been at war with Eastasia")
Ummm, iPhone 4 was still the top selling smart phone in the period, and I believe the 3GS was number 2.... The 4S had JUST come out. Check Q4 numbers for 4S sales.
I tried to read all of the posts to see if someone else mentioned it, but didn't see one that did. Aside from the problems with Google Checkout not being widespread, there is a huge problem with the functionality of the market. At least once a month I get an email from someone that says they bought my app but the download would not complete. They demand their money back from me. This is annoying for two reasons. One, it is entirely possible that their order was never charged. If you look over your checkout account, there are several attempted purchases every single day that didn't go through. It happened to a friend of mine that tried to purchase one of my apps, and I know there was money on his debit card. This is a lot of money in lost sales. The second reason it is annoying is because I am being wrongly blamed for Google's incompetence. When customers complain to me that an app they purchased wasn't downloaded, it is the equivalent of buying a PS3 off of Amazon and complaining to Sony that Amazon never shipped it. I've never once gotten a support email from an iOS user about the same issue. And over a two year period there have been dozens from Android users. Google also has MUCH less developer support than Apple does. They simply do not care about us or our opinions. Period. They seem to view the market as an after thought as well. Why should I make them my primary platform under those circumstances?
Windows PC vs Macintosh. The more open platform won.
I don't recall Linux winning. Windows to Mac, both are almost as closed.
Wait, actually even that is not true. OS X is based on Darwin which is open source, and also BSD which is open source - and a lot of the things it ships with (like Apache or Bash) are open source.
So doesn't in fact history tell us here that closed won definitively?
Android vs iOS. The same is happening here with the Android platform having a significantly larger userbase.
Aha, but the tricky thing is defining what a smartphone user really is. If it's someone that merely owns a smartphone, Android is "winning". But if it's users that actually use smart phones as, well, smart phones - it would appear iOS is winning handily by any metric (app sales, developer interest, percentage of users on web logs).
Give it a couple more years. Apple will be a fading memory.
I DARE you to short Apple. It is a rising behemoth that is only just at the start of REAL growth.
And yes, I have bought stock - at varying levels since $30...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And you seem to have forgotten that the suits are still ongoing. Only the injunctions to halt sales during the trial were denied or lifted.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
I'd rather be a freedom fighter than a communist where everyone's phone must look and act the same way so no one feels left out of "the experience".
It assumes linear, progressive growth in line with what we see.
But technology doesn't work that way.
Namely, free stuff has always been, and will likely continue to be, a rising tide of stuff. Stuf that... well... you can get for free.
You can't sell DOS to a market where Linux is free, or Office 95 to a market that has free office products that cover most of the basic functionality.
The point I'm making is not "payware is doomed". Far from it. But it starts like a wild west of opportunity, but over time the rising tide of free stuff drowns out a lot of the noise, and it's only those that manage to keep their head above it and progressively innovate and get better that contribute to what ultimately becomes the "settled" market.
Mobile software is still in its wild-west hayday. But when things get popular (and profitable) the probability that some developer throws his guts into a free alternative rises. Let time do its thing. Let the pay-vs-free balance settle and the PC effect to take over.
Yes, iOS will always probably make more because Apple-ecosystem users have a more solid standing culture of paying for their software.
BUT beware anyone who picks up that initial growth trend, extrapolates it linearly and builds mountains of logic on that.
Because, if we've learned anything, our beloved tech industry doesn't like'em straight lines.
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Could the figures in TFA have anything to do with the very large number of usable and feature rich free apps on Android, vs the iOS platform where it seems the norm to charge 99c for everything?
This is one of the first things I noticed when my sister got an iPhone and wanted to know how to monitor her 3G data usage. I figured we'll download an app for that, they are all free right? Took me 20 min to find a damn free one in the Apple app store. Even basic things like games are the same. Angry birds is ad supported on the Android and costs 99c on the iPhone. Fruit ninja is ad supported on the Android costs, 99c on the iPhone.
Then some monkey with a set of statistics say people make more money on the iOS platform? Well you don't say!
To make money on the Android platform from sales you're not only competing against other apps, you're likely competing against free apps.
You are correct that untargeted ads are worth less, and my sense is with yours that game advertising is worth less as people go into a game app to play a game, not click ads.
You imply, or an implication can be drawn, that this is so throughout Android, but I have not found it to be the case. I have two apps that use Admob. One is an app used by many bartenders, bouncers and so forth, and I've found the Admob ads often reflect that line of work. Another app is a database app and I've found the Admob ads often advertise database-related things. So it is somewhat targeted - people who work with databases download my database app, get database-related ads, and click them when the ad interests them enough. I'm sure with Google's purchase of Admob that they're working on future versions which will probably be more targeted - I know they already do targeting by geographical location.
A link to a site that makes a statement based on data they admit they don't have.
Also, boiling developer app down to money is pretty stupid.
Another Apple Apologist making shit up to protect their shiny. Pathetic.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Simple. Java is big, slow and crashes.
Eclipse as an IDE sucks.
BTW, I'm an android dev, not iOS.
"Microsoft has went at great lengths to make app developing for WP7 pleasant experience. They provide great tools"
Check this, a full fledged ERP, running in Android,it was developed using VELNEO, the IDE can be used in Windows, MacOSX or Windows, AFAIK.
The very same app, can run on Android, as you see in the video. You can present your customers a full fledged ERP for Android without knowing Android well, only using Velneo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXluV5jvmc0
...This troll, strawman comment was modded "insightful"?!
The reason is simple, I use a cross platform tool kit to create my apps. The apple versions out sell the android versions by at least 100-1 ratio. I quit even bothering to compile a android version. If I spend more than a hour testing and compiling a android version I am wasting my time. Once there is a few bucks to be made I will likely return to the android market, until then I am completely IOS / Apple Store focused.
I could care less what a android fan boy says.
1. Apple Store has better monetization.
2. IOS applications perform better (native execution)
3. The platform is standardized I am not trying to build for 300 different devices.
Got Code?
The Galaxy S II was the best selling device last round - even outselling the iPhone 4S.
The iPhone 4S has only been out 2 months. Too early for stats. The Galaxy S II certainly didn't outsell the iPhone (4). You're confused with the sales of the entire range of Samsung, which did outsell the iPhone. But that includes around 50 different Samsung phones, including many free with a contract ones.
I'm afraid your appraisal of Android as being a generation ahead of iPhone is as deluded as your misunderstanding of sales figures.
What their statistics really show is that iPhone developers are more likely to use their 3rd-party analytic library than Android.
If you look at the actual number of new apps released per day the Android Market is doing way better than the iPhone.
New apps per day on Android: 1,359 http://www.androlib.com/appstats.aspx
New apps per day on iPhone: 919 http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/
I don't like iOS development -- I passionately hate XCode, ObjC and Apples mixed bag of APIs. Android somehow manages to provide an even shittier development environment.
As a user, I don't care to create an account with Samsung or whoever to download OS updates. I'd sooner root the phone and install a vanilla distro. The moment I see a privacy warning, I opt out or cancel and would probably remove the app. There is no way on Earth I'd use any of the Android devices I own (for testing) as my main phone.
In short, must be some good schmidt that Eric is smoking.
1) You can develop from any platform. I develop on my Ubuntu 11.10 desktop. But you can also develop on Windows, MacOS or other Linux flavors. With iOS, you have to buy a Mac to start developing
2) It costs $25 to publish on Android Market for life. And you don't even have to - there's no "walled garden" like iOS has. The App Store has an annual fee which is $99 - with an even larger fee for the "enterprise program" whatever that is. (Speaking of Android's $25 fee, Admob just sent its first check to my Paypal account today for $22.95. So once they send me another $2.95 I'll be in the black. Actually I've already earned more than that extra $2.95 on my Admob account - they send you the money 6-8 weeks after earning it if you've accumulated $20 or more.
3) With Android, most non-game development is done in Java. A language many people know. With iOS, development is done in Objective C, a language that is not used outside of Apple-world anywhere near as much as Java. Objective C seems obscure to me - I have some written code at one time or another in C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Common Lisp, Basic, PHP and probably some languages I'm forgetting, but have never had cause to use Objective C. It might be a perfectly fine language, but I'm stuck having to learn not only iOS's SDK, but a new language I'll probably never use again. Java I've used before Android, and would be useful to know even if I stopped programming for Android. Of course, with some wrappers, Android will do C++ (and OpenGL) code just like iOS will.
4) Android is open source. It has derivative products like Cyanogenmod and the Kindle Fire. Instead of just getting hardware one company decides on, we can get a range of products from a number of manufacturers. This has a downside in addition to the upside, but I think the upside outweighs it.
5) Android smartphones have been outselling iPhones in past months. It seems like a trend that has taken hold. As far as the tablets, obviously Apple dominates. But I'm happy with my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1". I'm sure the ICS tablets will be even better. As far as Android users spending money, just with some basic math I can see some apps have made millions of dollars. Slingplayer mobile (does DVR stuff) has made at minimum $1.5 million. Beautiful Widgets has made at least $1.4 million. ATOK, which makes a more Japanese-friendly keyboard, has made $1 million. I haven't looked much at the games, I understand some of those have made money as well. The number of people with Android smartphones keeps growing, as do the quality of the phones, as do the quality of the apps - some apps are making millions, but more apps will probably make millions as well.
No, Google makes relatively little money from Android, and that's according to Google.
Just out of curiosity, if Google makes money from AdMob-served ads that are served to Android devices, how should they report that income? It's likely that this type of income is not attributed to Android and yet without Android, there would be more devices running iOS that would get iAds instead of those AdMob ads.
If Google makes $8b/year on ads and Android helps protect that revenue stream, it's not exactly fair to judge the success of Android based solely on how much money it makes directly. Android is part of a strategic effort to ensure that Google can serve ads to not only current platforms, but also those we use in the future. It runs not only on mobile phones, but it's behind GoogleTV and Google sees that as a way to break into the $70+b/year TV advertising market. It doesn't have to make money directly for Google to make money off it.
Alright, I'm willing to let the hardware superiority vs iPhone slide (we could start a pissing contest about specs if you want, but that won't get us anywhere). The fact is though that the top of the line HTC and Samsung phones are the best sellers, which puts lie to the whole "majority of Android buyers get cheap crap" angle.
to realize just how annoying Java is to people with a C background. Let's face it, C++ *is* the language of choice. It will take another generation of developers before that changes. Programming languages have *brutal* inertia. COBOL? Fortran? Pascal? C???
OBJ-C is used (grudgingly) for UI interactions, and the Apple dev tools make that as painless as possible. With Java, the whole process is painful.
How long does it take a C, C++ dev to have a simple iphone app up and running on an iphone? Well under an hour. What are the odds that it will run well on every idevice? Pretty damn good.
How long would it take the same dev to have something running on *any* droid phone? How long before they could be just as sure it would run on 90% of the currently deployed droid phones?
I use a droid phone. I pay for droid apps. I really appreciate the devs that support it. But I bought my mom an iphone 4 and advise most companies starting out in mobile apps to begin with IOS (or HTML5), depending on their target user.
On the other hand, ICS is slick. I've gotten quickly to the point where I can't stand using other OS's (Apple or Droid). But it's going to be very hard for the developers. Many applications just don't work so well on it (yet).
For a client. We built their very successful, very nice, iOS app.
It's hell making the Android port.
The iOS version of the App has these beautiful sliding table views that overlap each other with nice drop shadows. Simple gestures move them on and off the screen. As you scroll one of them, the other table view scrolls and highlights to match up to the corresponding section. When you tap products they animate and fade into an expanded information view. It's a really nice app and users love it.
Then they asked for the Android version, we're working on it. But we had to throw out the overlapping tables with drop shadows. We had to implement a stupid paging system for tables because they wouldn't scroll smoothly with ~2,000 products (each product has downloadable images that start to fetch when they are scrolled on screen). The table cells can't animate as they expand like on iOS. Putting a ScrollView inside a ScrollView doesn't "just work" like it does on iOS, where touches are correctly, and importantly, delayed slightly before being passed to inner-content views.
This app manages a lot of data and it works smoothly on iOS all the way back to an iPod Touch 2G, which has completely anemic hardware compared to the Galaxy S2. Yet the Galaxy S2 struggles with the sorts of interactions, UIs and data we ask it to render.
Another annoyance is that different Android phones seem to behave differently. On the HTC device we test with, our WebViews allow user scaling even though we disallow it in the meta-tag. Our loading indicators look different. We have to account for the user possibly using a different system font and thus can't rely on getting a pixel-perfect design to the. It truly sucks.
The final annoyance is that different Android phones have different color calibration. The colors are designed to match the company's printed books. Their printing spot colors work beautifully on iOS screens. Yet look at the Android app on a Galaxy S2 and HTC device (using the same RGB values) and the resulting colors are completely different.
I'm also trying to do things the "Android way." Yet I am rapidly discovering there is no consistent way to design apps for Android. Editable table views? Every app seems to do it differently. Google+ and Google Reader both handle them differently! How the hell do they let this happen?
I work for a small business that has a couple of apps on both iOS and Android. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
In a typical month, we net $20k from sales on iOS and $3k from sales on Android. The apps are nearly identical, the copy in the store *is* identical. The only differences are layout changes to make it feel natural on each platform. Yet actual app usage is roughly equal between the two, as measured by server requests/day.
Two lessons: 1) The Android demographic is much less likely to pay for applications (at least ours), and 2) Piracy is a much bigger problem on Android.
We're developing a new app that and rather than doing simultaneous release on iOS and Android, we're doing iOS first and will use its revenue to gauge whether the Android version is worth doing -- after a month or two we'll see what the ROI on Android would be at 15% of whatever the iOS version is doing.
This sucks, because I use an Android phone and prefer Android myself. But as a small company we would be crazy to devote the same resources to a platform that underperforms in revenue.
Right now, the problem with android is that it's not really a platform from the developers point of view.
iOS versions have few enough phones that, while they aren't a "True" platform, they can fake it. And where they can't Apple has the negotiating power from preventing the carriers from diluting the platform too much.
Android developers have to develop for markets more than for the android platform, J Random Developer's chat app in Korean works on the Samsung Galaxy S in Korea, does it work on the Galaxy S in the US? Well for some carriers yes... That's not a platform.
The reason Android is selling more phones is the reason developers don't like it, because instead of the user paying, the developer pays.
Oh and more android apps are free or ad-supported.
App-testing time is the one true metric.
Right now Android can't even get into the same ballpark as Nokia(which makes oodles of different, incompatible phones, but has an os so limited, there's less to test), let alone iOS.
Hey! Some of us have trouble growing any sort of facial hair, you insensitive clod!
Professionals deal with the situation at hand, and jump in. That's why they are called professionals. YOU, on the other hand, instead of blaming your poor ability to cope, blame the situation. Remind me to not hire you for anything. You seem to have this attitude that employers work for you.
Android is outselling iOs.
There are more Android devices being sold. Yes.
Who is making more money on the total devices sold? To date, Apple, by a wide margin.
Turning to Apps Apple is still selling more apps and has more apps to sell - again by a wide margin.
What you say is true only for a narrow definition, and not one that matters to developers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The reason why iOS isn't plagued with trojans and viruses (not that I believe Android necessarily is) is not because it's necessarily technically better but because it's a walled garden.
But that IS a technical choice, to limit how users can get applications. Therefore it is in fact technically better, because of fundamental design choices that strengthened security through iOS in extra ways that were not needed or designed for on Android.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People are talking about "apps" like they've always been around but, in actuality, they are still are very new idea to most of the inhabitants of this world.
My definition of an "app" is a small software application that's designed to do one job particularly well in as small a memory profile as possible - if you're like me and worked with UNIX and Linux for years, you also know that "lots of programs that are designed to do one job very well" has always been the core development concept behind any UNIX-like system and why people complain about it being difficult because they don't know what program to use to do a specific task when there are hundreds of little applications that possibly need to be combined in certain ways to do something specific.
I don't subscribe to walled gardens and therefore don't own any Apple devices and never will whilst that walled garden ecosystem exists. But I do freely admit that there are people out there who are using iPhones and iPads now as their main computing device. As a computer and OS geek, to me an iPad is nothing more than an expensive gadget but a lot of older people I know love iPads which they consider to be easier to use than a PC, some have even replaced their PC with an iPad.
Whilst I personally prefer Android, I don't see the same thing happening with that at the moment. The Android tablet market is still in its infancy and I know of nobody who owns one yet. The nearest comparison I can make is i know quite a few people who took advantage of the cheap HP tablet deal (my wife works for them) and whilst their happy with the price they got them for, none of them have replaced their home PCs with one.
Therefore, the logical assumption I can make here is that there is more money to be made per person from Apple users because many of them no longer spend money on PC software having ditched those.
Another point to consider is the difference in the taget markets for iOS and Android. Apple devices have a premium price, therefore marketing types will perceive Apple users as having more money to spend than someone who owns Android on a £99 mobile phone. If you look at the number of applications that run on iOS, I would say that iOS has far more apps devoted to selling the user something than does Android - e.g. airline ticket bookings, train timetables, local restaurant details, etc.
The point I'm trying to make here is that in the days when people did everything on desktop PCs, 95% of them used a Windows PC and therefore bought software for it as a captive audience. A developer could create a piece of software fairly sure in the knowledge that if it was a good enough application or game, then people would flock to buy it and the developers just needed to develop it for one platform.
However, with mobile devices, now you have multiple platforms of Android, iOS, Blackberry and potentially Windows Mobile (or whatever it's called), you have a demand for smaller and simpler applications, plus a marketplace that was once the domain of big software developers now open to just about anyone who has a good idea for an application and wants to sell it.
Add to that the fact that people are no longer paying £50 or so for a big software application but £3 for a small application, and the whole development scene has become a lot more complicated as a result. Under such circumstances, developers are going to target what they develop for very carefully and where they can get the most money for the least effort.
So ultimately, the number of apps for a platform has absolutely nothing to do with how good its development tools are or whether or not it's a walled garden - it's just down to prioritising to those people who are likely to spend the most money.
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
Ok, every time someone uses the word "polish," you have to take a drink of something containing alcohol.
The conversation here will get interesting soon enough.
Android is neat but an absolute pain in the arse to write for. It's a mess.
IOS on the other hand is really easy. Apple put a lot of work in the SDK. I WISH that someone would clean up Android so that I could have as easy of a time writing for android.
i also wish that apple was not butt-headded and let someone come up with a unifying system to write once and compile for both platforms. Honestly, it's silly that I have to maintain two separate codebases for a single program.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sorry that you are not clever enough to make an iphone look and act different. It took me 15 minutes to make mine look so different that people dont believe it's an iphone.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The iOS dev tools are $599 but they come with a free computer. Furthermore, you have to pay per year to be able to run programs that you compiled on an iPod, iPhone, or iPad that you bought. The Android dev tools, on the other hand, run on any computer that can run Java, including the one you're more likely to already own (a Windows or Linux box), and "adb install" is free.
I can't run iFlipr on my 1st Gen iPod Touch.
If you want to ship Google Apps you need to certify your device which costs money
How much does that cost? Is the cost of certification one of the reasons there really wasn't a counterpart to the iPod touch until the release of the Samsung Galaxy Player a couple months ago?
How is that a fact? What's your citation?
If it is a superset of J2SE, then where's Swing?
Android uses Java, iOS uses Objective-C. They are both decades old technology. Android uses Eclipse, iOS uses XCode, both cumbersome and bloated IDEs. Google's Java APIs inherit the usual tedium of Java APIs, but at least you get runtime safety and JIT compilation. Objective-C has slightly nicer APIs and plays nicer with legacy C libraries, but the language is unsafe and dangerous in the usual ways. So, I really don't see much of a reason to prefer one over the other on technical grounds.
In the end, what matters is who owns and controls the platform, and there Android has a clear advantage: it is open source, so no matter how badly Google may screw up in the future, the platform will live on. On the other hand, with iOS, you are subject to whatever arbitrary decisions Apple makes, and they have a long history of screwing their users and their developers.
On iOS, the XML DOM parser runs through 5,000 XML items in 2.0 seconds. On Android, on a good phone, it runs for 2 minutes before exhausting memory. On iOS, animation is as simple as setting a view property, and saying "animate to it". On Android, animations have to be done by hand, with translate, scale, and alpha, except that on 2.2 devices, not all views support alpha, so you have to use a Transition Image background, and a TextSwitcher to animate text. To draw a red, shiny button on iOS, you say, "shiny, red". On Android, you use a bitmap with a color set with a transparency. Want a horizontal grid repeater? Oh, sorry. Gesture Detection in your custom widget? Better know how to implement viscosity, so it does it smoothly. On and on and on. Like Eclipse crashing? The debugger detaching in the middle of a session? I've been on Android for 2 years now, and it's been a story of frustration. I find it inconceivable that someone would specify a variant of java to run ON Linux (where you don't have to worry about interfering with other applications) on a limited-power/CPU device, then have the GUI run without acceleration, AND THEN WRITE THE APIs in Java?
It's the attitude of "Let's get something out that works, and we'll improve it later", instead of, "let's make sure it rocks before anyone else sees it"
What is this, wikipedia? Your google broken or something? You haven't actually been into a mobile store? Fine - Top 10 best selling Android phones 2011. Best Android phones June 2011 Top 5 selling Android phones 2011. Not a cheap device listed.
1. Java. Having developed for iOS and Android, Java is a _real_ pain.
2. The interface designer for android leaves much to be desired. You can't even move objects without creating a specific view for them.
Oh, bonch, you fat skinny jean wearing low life piece of shit. Your frustration with the success of Android is splendid. I hope your vile towards Android is the end of a lonely shit stain such as you.
I know app shops that dont build for Android anymore coz they got sick of there apps getting hacked and put on the market for free or nexts to nothing. With Apple you do get looked after a bit better.
It's probably true that Apple has a near monopoly on the early adopter spendoids. I don't think there are a lot more people out there lining up to be so loose with their cash. They are already at the apogee of milking their traditional 10%
I don't think you understand what is happening at all. Apple's "traditional" market share in the same space as the iPhone is the iPod at around 80-90%. And a vast majority of the phone market remains to convert to smartphone use. Even if your guess of 10% were accurate, Apple is not even close to an apogee for about a decade.
Apple users are not all early adopters at this point. Indeed I would say early adopters now are a small portion of Apple's user base. And Apple has never gone after early adopters anyway, because they are far more about refinement over time than crazy new stuff every month or featureitis that gets the early adopter blood flowing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The iOS dev tools are $599 but they come with a free computer.
Your joke ignores the fact that some already have a Mac, including man *nix oriented folks who find Mac OS X a nicer *nix environment. It also ignores the fact that iOS development only requires a very modest mac so a used one will do quite well. It also ignores the fact that a Mac can make a good Windows system so the effective cost may often be the difference between your next PC and a comparable Mac.
My fiance has an HTC Desire. When it was released it was one of the best, if not the best Android phone out there, and still remains a good example of an Android phone.
Now, a while back she bought the Moron Test app (fun little game, she was playing the free version initially and bought the full app for the rest of the test). Some time this month I believe, Moron Test 2 was released, so when she saw this on the Android Market site, she bought it without hesitation. But... it doesn't run. Says something like "The application Moron Test 2 (process com.distinctdev.mt2) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again" or some bullshit that you shouldn't be seeing on a phone app.
According to the user reviews for the app (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.distinctdev.tmt2), she's not the only one who can't even launch the game, but evidently some people can. Obviously I have to blame the developers for not running proper QA and testing for the various Android phones that are out there, but I also recognize the fact that the iPhone has a very select number of models, which makes it far easier to ensure that your app will work for anyone else, since the hardware is going to be identical within a certain family of phones. Not everyone wants to bother with checking all various Android phones out there, and so it's less attractive to the developer/publisher.
Since it was only $0.99 she's not that fussed, and is hoping an update will appear that fixes the problem. Pity though.
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
One reason. The iOS marketplace in dollar terms is 7x the size of the Android, Blackberry and Nokia marketplaces combined.
They don't need a mac and $99.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Still, for as open as you seem to think Mac OS X is, why can't I download Darwin and run Mac software on it?
Because the top layer is not open.
But what layer at all of Windows can you download openly and run at all?
Where are all of the applications for OS X?
Well that was a stupid question.
Why doesn't OS X work on just any commodity PC hardware?
It does. Apple just doesn't sell it that way.
Why does Apple go sue crazy when someone puts together a Hackintosh or when someone even posts a video showing one?
Wait, you are already contradicting yourself? What an ass. I'll stop resounding here since it's clear you are just another Apple Hater Troll.
P.S. as for selling now - well, you've made (by your own admission!) some pretty stupid statements, but that probably is the stupidest.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thank you for explaining the simplest basics of the stock market to the Apple Haters. Saves me time and effort.
You'll not find they learn very fast or well, but at least someone else might learn from your post, which is all I even aim for in responding to the haters. Well that and ridiculing their ignorance, you could have probably gone heavier in that direction for my tastes but I respect your initial unjaded desire to keep it clean.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Reading back over my comment I realize it made it sound like I was labeling you a hater, I really meant for it to be more like everyone including the haters thinks Jobs was the magic behind Apple.
Well even that does not sound quite right. But basically I just wanted you to know I thought you were making a real effort at thinking about the relationship between Jobs and Apple and I do appreciate reasoned thinking.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As long as making a hit app is harder than porting from one to the other, developers will port every hit from their favorite to the other before searching for another hit. Because nobody in his right mind is going to turn down hundreds of millions more customers. So the hit apps will be present on both.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This whole article shall be kept as the final example on how marketing drones killed slashdot moderation. First, we have a company that is a direct competitor to Google Analytics, and which targes iOS, coming with a "study" claming iOS users pay more for apps. Then, we have a drone posting it anonymously. Finally, we have the comments section completely distorted, with already identified Waggener Edstrom employees (InsightIn140Bytes) rants getting +5 insightful moderation. Even ACs are getting +5 insightful moderation as long as they spew the same twisted lies and fabrications against android and pro iOS or pro WP7. In the middle of this, any insightful coment is downvoted heavilly.
Congratulations marketards, seems like you finally managed to destroy the remains of slashdot usefulness.
It's more fun to code with Xcode, than Eclipse. UI's response and supportiviness in Xcode beats Eclipse, also I enjoy hunting possible memory leaks!
Dont forget Symbian (IE Nokia largest cell maker in the world) ;)
Well, others up above have presented quite a broad range of topics why one or the other can be preferred from a lot of points of view. I'll just add my own to the list.
I have to tell, I don't (well, at least not yet) create mobile apps for a living, and I don't create mobile apps for money either. But I create some mobile apps for research purposes, with the strong need of being able to use low level (native) coding on a mobile device, beause some (if not all) algorithms I deal with require low level code optimized as well as possible, and access to as much memory as possible.
Adding to the above the number of people who can do good objective-c coding (I'll add here, that from my fairly large list of connections including a large number of coders, developers, IT guys and a long list of researchers, some dealing only with mobile stuff, _none_ know or use objective-c), and take into consideration how many people know and code fairly well in c/c++, my choice for Android really was a nobrainer.
Also, I need to add, that for me the UI (taking into consideration all the above) is a second grade issue, more a necessity than a strong requirement, so being able to fairly easily put together a usable UI (which is good enough with the Android sdk) while being able to do coding in c/c++ (through the Android ndk) was the winner combination. Also, since the easy java parts and the c/c++ parts, it's easier to include others in the development process.
Maybe one day when objective-c become so popular that everyone works with it, I'll reconsider. Until then, forget me and the iOS living together.
But, going back to the topic of money, if one day I'd have to produce a mobile app for the money, I'd probably take up iOS development, objective-c included. As many others, I live from the money I earn and not from charities, so yes, of course, targeting a larger and better paying market can drive the chocies in the development process.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
As long as making a hit app is harder than porting from one to the other, developers will port every hit from their favorite to the other before searching for another hit. Because nobody in his right mind is going to turn down hundreds of millions more customers. So the hit apps will be present on both.
I would like to agree with you but one of the most popular apps for the iPad is called GoodReader.
It has well over 32,000 reviews and a strong almost perfect five stars from all those users. I find it a very well done universal file manager for the iPad and basically the best PDF Reader you can get for iOS. Every month they have another update that adds even more features and another ton of new users.
When you inquire how soon it will be before they port this blockbuster to Android the developer says never! GoodReader uses too many outstanding native features built into iOS to make their app function smoothly that it would be major pain to try to write it for Android.
Do a search for "Why No GoodReader Android" and you will find the developers page which explains why they never will do an Android version. There are a lot of angry Android users when they find out they can not have it or something just as good.
I support both iOS and Android users and while looking at another popular specialized Reader app I was astonished that even thought the Android version costs twice as much at $20 compared to $9.95 in the Apple version in the app store, the Android version has remarkably fewer features and far less support for all kinds of documents.
IMHO it is not worth any where near they price they soak an Android user for with those key features missing, but thousands of them buy it each week for Android, many do not even realize they have been taken.
The reason extra features are there on the iPad is that all the heavy lifting is built in iOS by Apple.
Once you understand how it works, the iPhone and the iPad are just simpler to deal with in creating high quality apps. IMHO that is why most developers are attracted to working with iOS as the target platform for their latest creation.
Off course it is also nice that they get 300% greater return for their efforts by using the Apple app store. If you have a narrow audience that will seek you out where ever you are, you have it made.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Psst, they know it's an iphone because you constantly mention it.
They're either trying to be kind, or sarcastic.
"Oh wow! you put a bumper on it and changed the wallpaper? If you hadn't asked if I wanted to see your iphone, I totally would have thought it was an android..."
"if you hadn't mentioned it was an iphone while showing me your instagram stream, I totally would have thought it was an android"
"if you hadn't told me for the third time about your steve jobs chest tattoo, I totally would have thought that you used android..."
Believe me, you're left out.
In much the same way that desktop devs may prefer to develop for the Mac or Linux but end up writing code for Windows. If the people in marketing decide that it's better to go where the mass market is then you're going to end up having to develop for it, like it or not.
If you're a small developer you can probably get away with continuing to be iOS only, in much the same way there have been small Mac only developers since the Mac was first released. I can't see many medium to large developers remaining iOS only, no matter how much it pains them, in exactly the same way that companies like Adobe started releasing Windows products.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
I've got a ton of paid apps on android, either because the apps I want are pay-only, or because I want to directly support the developer. I've got more apps on my android than I did on my Apple, in part because the former allows the apps I want to be created.
Are there statistics showing that more people are willing to pay on apple? There are free apps there too, after all.
It's been a long time.
I would like to agree with you but one of the most popular apps for the iPad is called GoodReader.
Your argument does agree with the parent poster. In GoodReader's case, finding another hit is easier than porting GoodReader to Android. The find another hit vs difficulty of porting ratio is going to be different for each app (and each developer). I'd be surprised if you couldn't find an Android app that is so tightly tied to Android that porting to iOS would be more or less impossible.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Claiming the statement is wrong, based on another bias article.. What we got here is another pointless argument. We can only guess what the future holds.
I couldn't find Cool Reader (no PDF support, but support for many other formats) for iOS and was sorely disappointed when I couldn't open my pdb and epub ebooks on goodreader. Goodreader also poorly handled my PDF ebooks (mainly raygun revival pdfs - page elements screwed up, obnoxiously slow on some of the image pages) that worked fine in adobe reader on both iOS and Android.
Look into Cool Reader, it's one of the first results in Android market's search and it's been there for quite a few months.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Maybe some of you are familiar with another webcomic: General Protection Fault
Some time ago they ran a story where a customer hires GPF Software to develop a multi-platform (i.e. iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and WebOS) mobile application for their customer portal. Each developer in the staff is assigned a platform according to his/her knowledge. Developing the apps runs smoothly, till they are ready to launch them on the respective apps markets...
Hilarity ensues.
(Sorry, I can not browse the comic right now, you will have to look for the episode in the archive by yourselves.)
In the long run we are all dead. - John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
You forgot overweight living in mom's basement virgins.
Your joke ignores the fact that some already have a Mac
What percentage already have a Mac from the Intel era? I'm willing to reduce the expected cost of Xcode by the percentage of people who already have such a Mac. But I would be surprised if you could show that more developers who don't already develop applications for Mac OS X or iOS have a Mac than don't have a Mac. Please show me what surprises me.
It also ignores the fact that a Mac can make a good Windows system so the effective cost may often be
...little different than buying a Mac and a budget PC separately. A PC including OEM Windows can cost as little as $300, but the retail copy of Windows Home Premium needed for use with a Mac costs $200 by itself. And using OEM Windows on a Mac is just as EULA-violating (and just as illegal in jurisdictions where EULAs are enforceable) as a hackintosh.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Alright, I'm willing to let the hardware superiority vs iPhone slide (we could start a pissing contest about specs if you want, but that won't get us anywhere). The fact is though that the top of the line HTC and Samsung phones are the best sellers, which puts lie to the whole "majority of Android buyers get cheap crap" angle.
No, because there are a lot of cheap no-name or carrier-branded Android phones out there. Individually, they don't sell too many, but there are a lot of them. Add those to the low-end HTCs and Samsungs, and they collectively outnumber all of the flagship Motorola/HTC/Samsung models.
First point - don't trust retailer "bestseller" lists. I used to work for a book distributer, and the company used to print up "bestseller" before the books on them were even published.
I've also used one of the mainstream off the shelf eCommerce systems. It allows you to calculate bestseller lists from actual sales, but also gives the facility to insert any other products into the list too.
Bestseller lists are marketing tools, not reliable sources of information for the public.
Second point: Even if those are the best selling US and Europe models, doesn't mean that most Android phones sold are from that top end. There are hundreds of small manufacturers shovelling out cheap crap. And they are being sold all around the world. Together they outnumber the flagship devices.
2/3 of Google's mobile search comes from iOS devices.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
As a developer who would like to write apps for both platforms, I only write apps for Android for a few simple reasons:
1) You have to have a Mac to do iPhone development
2) The Apple App Store requires you to pay every year to keep using the store while Android Market only requires a one time payment
3) I have more friends who own Android phones than own iPhones, so this gives me a larger group of testers.
4) This one no longer applies, but you used to have to be on AT&T to have an iPhone
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
This may sound silly, but as the iOS development suite includes an iOS simulator, so that you can develop an iOS application and test it on a pseudo iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch without having to purchase the $99 developer license.
Yes, it does sound silly. Is the simulator cycle-accurate to at least one device model the way, for example, modern NES emulators are? Because if not, some operations are going to be faster on the simulator than on the device and others vice versa, giving the developer a misleading picture of the application's performance. This can hurt when the developer submits an application, especially given Apple's requirement that apps not "make the UI look sluggish".
However, the toolkit only runs on MacOS, so you will have to buy a Mac.
Hence my $599 comment.
But technological progress deflated prices to the point where today a top of the line video card costing a few hundred $ runs circles around a Power Onyx with Infinite Reality engine, costing a quarter million $.
The Brilliance of Apple is they did that to themselves, rather than let another company do it.
They could have just sat on premium laptops all day long as laptops and other "computers" as we know them slipped into the sunset of the post-PC era.
But instead Apple, as they have been willing to do before, chose to build low end devices good enough to cannibalize those computer sales - the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch.
Apple has ALREADY introduced the innovations that brought down Silicon Graphics and get to ride that wave again. Competitors are struggling to match the price of any of those devices, they lack the software and usually have to omit some hardware to match up at all or try to go cheaper (only the in phone space is there somewhat parity, but there Apple is giving away phones for free now so it's absurd to claim that are "high end").
Slashdot is so filled with blind men that not only have picked just one part of the elephant to examine, but refuse to admit elephants exist when it's pointed out there is a larger body of fact they are ignoring.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I am a developer for iOS, and I currently have no plans for android and this is why:
I have read these stats, but they may be slightly outdated...
1. the average ios owner has an average of 60 apps.
the average android owner has an average of 12 apps.
2. ios owners are 10 times more likely to pay for an app
3. minimal lag/chop is experienced on iOS devices.
My personal belief about why 1 and 2 are true, is because the app store is controlled so people feel more confident that they are not going to be ripped off when they download an app.
The problem here is, it's far easier to pay for apps on iOS than it is on Android. You have iTunes gift cards that you can buy in a store and use to buy apps, music, anything for iOS. It even supports Paypal.
Google however, requires you to use Google Checkout or Google Wallout (one in the same?) or a credit card, but doesnt have any kind of gift card or prepaid card you can buy in a store, and it doesn't support paypal. I use paypal a LOT. Probably more than my bank account and if the Android Market allowed the use of paypal, I would most definitely buy a lot more apps.
Final summation: Android Market and google in general needs more options of payment, otherwise this will never change and iOS will still be dominant in this aspect.
As opposed to the free computer you were using before?
The computer one was using before is a sunk cost, unless you were already planning on replacing your computer at the same time. And even then, it's a difference between $400 PC with Windows and a $600 Mac mini with a $200 copy of Windows.
iOS still enjoys a big first mover advantage. They had a big lead in everything (quality of product, number of sales, size of installed base, and spending habits of users), but all of that is narrowing. Android now has a major lead in current sales, a sizable lead in installed base, and has largely caught up on the quality front.
Apple's not going to dwindle away, but every indication is that they are heading toward a high-end niche position like the Mac, while Android will have greatly more users. It's going to be a self-reinforcing cycle.
Also, a big chunk of the preference iOS people have for XCode et al is simply familiarity and personal preference. The Android development environment is perfectly usable (I'd agree with some of the above comments about xml layouts, though).
Isn't it one of the perks of a paid account to be able to see articles before they are posted and know when they will be posted, to be able to try and get frost pisst?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
First point: So you just discount evidence that does not fit your preconceived ideas without offering any counter-evidence. If you don't believe in best-seller lists, why did you even bother asking for citations?
Second point: You might be right, but how the hell do we know? Google doesn't count those units as activated Android handsets. Bringing third-world and developing markets into a argument about best selling devices is... unorthodox, if not blatantly disingenuous.
So, why is WP7 market share falling?
Because the market of smartphones is expanding faster than WP7 is growing - but WP7 adoption is still growing... and not all of the pieces I mentioned were in place until VERY recently.
Nor is Microsoft pushing hard quite yet (though they are starting).
Next quarter is when you should start to see more motion.
Are you pinning your hopes for WP7 on Nokia?
The combination as a key device that is really well done.
Nokia is losing market share left, right and center to Android.
Until now, of course. They only JUST shipped a WP7 phone.
Plus WP7 is failing badly in the consumer's market.
Again because they lacked a really good OS on really good hardware. Now they have both, it's marketing's job to say "here's something really different and cool". The thing is what they have built is in fact well done and cool, and that will resonate with real people. It's why Apple has had such success.
This leads me to believe that Nokia's WP7 phones will not make a dent in Apple or Android market share
With Microsoft attacking the free angle by charging carriers to use Android (as they have been) and also coming at them from the quality angle in a way only the iPhone has until now, I see Android in for a real squeeze.
Smart money doesnâ(TM)t believe WP7 phones will help Nokia, and I have to side with that opinion.
Perhaps conventions wisdom doesn't think it will help. But then it always has been poor at predicting change in the future...
Microsoft already had a big WP7 marketing push.
They had a small push at launch. You are about to see an order of magnitude larger attack, because Microsoft AND Nokia know success is crucial and must be had.
To me how it plays out is all so obvious, I can understand where you are coming from but I just can't see it happening that way and I really think you are underestimating huge key players. As I said, we'll see in about a year.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Fascinating.
The androidcentral.com article talks about the "Best" Android phones according to a made-up criterion, not about how well they sell: Android Central's Top 10 Android Phones Report ranks the popularity of the best Android Phones over the past 30 days as determined by our proprietary algorithm which compiles data from across the AC community and beyond.
The other two links are indeed taken from the same list, as they coincide (as they should). But the blendblogger.com article is from September 5, and, even worse, the metacafe video was added on August 16. That's way too premature to call the list of top-whatevers of 2011, making me wonder if someone misquoted the original source (which neither link cites), and these people are just repeating the error like parrots.
Also, the lists mention the HTC EVO 3D as the top selling Android phone. But it was released on June 24, or only 53 days before the metacafe video was posted, and already jumpet to the top of the list... I guess it sold much more than the iPhone 4S!
People paying premium prices for shiny new gadgets are the best group to target useless application to.