Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
FTFA
Unfortunately for Google, this is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to the uphill battle they face in the fight for developers. Clunkier development tools for Android have been on ongoing problem, and let's not forget about the vast number of scamware, crapware and malware apps that permeate through the Android Marketplace. The lack of an approval process for apps on Android certainly has its benefits, but letâ(TM)s not forget thereâ(TM)s also a downside to being open.
So you mean I get to use lousier development tools, potentially have my app hijacked by scammers looking to repackage my app as malware AND deal with fragmentation?
SIGN ME UP!
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Screw the language. Interface builder rocks. Using XML files with no WYSIWYG editor? Screw that.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.
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.
This sounds like an argument for thoroughly testing your software and not releasing with bugs.
Game developers have had similar issues on other platforms. It used to be that when you released on a cartridge you actually had to do good work the first time. You can't patch a cartridge in the wild. With internet connected consoles, the problem has been getting worse and worse. It used to be that when you bought a game at launch it was solid. Now you're pretty much guaranteed to get something extremely buggy until the first few patches, assuming you actually get the whole game and the developers haven't decided to favor an early release and just update the game with more content later, leaving you with a pretty threadbare experience.
So if your complaint is that Apple makes things difficult if you don't write good code the first time, maybe the problem isn't with Apple. Heck, your description just made Apple's system sound much better to me. Why would I want to buy buggy games?
Actually the original version of Android was specifically for blackberry-style devices with a physical keyboard and some kind of d-pad like interface.
Read his post again, did he say that Android copied Apple anywhere? No, he pointed out valid underlying architectural and business reasons why these issues exist on Android devices.
Yes, Android today is designed for many different form factors and input methods. But ultimately when you design for many different things, you end up building to a lowest common denominator, and sacrifices are made. I think you argued his point for him actually. Since Apple requires all their devices to have GPU-acceleration, IOS benefits. Android doesn't require it, and so you have to build your apps to specifically take advantage of it. By targeting cheap devices, they sacrificed user experience.
Oh, and considering how secretive Apple is, and that Android was announced before the iPhone, who else would Android be competing agains in the pre-iPhone marketplace? The playing field was Symbian (very small developer base) Palm (already dying as they started shipping WinMobile devices) Microsoft (with their very painful an kludgy Mobile OS which has since been killed) and Blackberry. Blackberry was the smartphone leader by a very large margin before the iPhone appeared.
Stop pushing anti-Apple revisionist history. It's just as bad as pro-Apple revisionist history.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....