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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."
>>Xcode is a wonderful IDE
I"d love to know why you rate it that, and what you're comparing it to? Specifics would be great.
There's no way I can write this without coming off as some sort of biased hater. I'll state I'm not. But believe what you may.
You must have a different build of XCode than the rest of us. It's a slow nightmare (I'm on a latest iMac - sandy bridge. You know, the ones that can't even run the 4.3 iOS emulator because of esoteric CPU/asm issues. Thanks Apple!). We can't use CLANG on our codebase because it shits it's pants on more advanced C++ half the time. The iteration time between to the simulator is poor. The iteration time to the device is a nightmare (even worse in XCode4 which is much less smart about the deployment than XCode3). With multithreaded code the UI constantly loses sync of breakpoints with GDB, so you're breaking and you have NFI why. At least XCode4 has got a bit more reliable in giving you access to C++ variables than XCode3 - where most of the time you had to result to "debugging via printf()". It's amazing that running a 4GB Mac, a good portion of the time it's swapping because XCode is such a pig (currently my gdb-i386-apple-darwin process is using 700MB. Just the debugger!. I could scream).
Obviously, I could rant all day.
XCode is the *bane of my existence*. But unavoidable. My team ONLY ships on iOS, but we keep a Win32 version of our code in sync, and do 95% of our development on that. Everybody has two computers - PC and Mac. Was a ton of effort to get to this point, but the Win32 tools are soooooo much better and faster. Writing code that doesn't require me to directly access device/OS specifics, i'm at least 2-3x as productive on the PC than the mac. Mostly for the amount of time i spend *waiting* for something to happen. When you have an app with hundreds of MB of data, and you have to go through the 'sandboxing' and 'validating' steps a few hundred times........you get close to snapping. I've tried screaming at the screen "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!??! I'M ONLY RERUNNING THE DEBUGGING SESSION!??!?! I HAVEN'T CHANGED ANYTHING?!?!? PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP!?!?!?!". It doesn't work.
Ooops. Need to unplug/replug the iPhone because XCode has gotten 'confused' again and doesn't think it's provisioned. I guess that's better than yesterday when it got 'confused' and wasn't actually deploying the new binaries to the device and I wasn't debugging the build I thought I was. I'd like that hour of my life back.
I wish XCode was better. I really do. So I find your 'wonderful' comment mystifying. Because I don't know a single iOS developer, familiar with other tools, that would agree.
Correct, as was the rest of what you wrote, but it seems my +5 posts all have been modbombed down to +1 in the span of a few hours, apparently because I posted technical facts about Android.
Now, I know Slashdot tends to be heavily pro-Android, but this is completely ridiculous. Some people are outright ignoring and censoring historical facts because they've picked a side in a tribalist war of smartphone operating systems.