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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."
> 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?
Yes, yes, and yes.
Xcode is a wonderful IDE, and with things like CLANG/LLVM and LLDB it's only getting better. Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are insanely great APIs and Objective C kicks the shit out of Java in terms of readability and performance. The development experience for iOS is much, much more streamlined and defined then Android.
I'm not even sure if it's worth mentioning the fact that Google (and it's associates) actively brag about a new Android device every week now- with different specs, hardware, and screen resolutions. Trying to support a moving target like Android is a nightmare, so you might as well pick the top 5 phones and make sure your stuff works on those- and forget about the five thousand other devices out there (which may or may not work).
Comparing iOS to Android is like comparing the Xbox 360 to a PC. You get a stable and well defined platform with one, and a crapshoot with the other.
-AC
Why Developers Still Prefer iOS To Android
Is there something inherently better with iOS development?
Yes. iOS has an integrated development environment including debugging tools that allow on the fly changes to the code while debugging.
Is the API better written?
Yes. The iOS API is more feature rich and provides things like low latency audio.
Is there some technological inferiority to Android? Is it cheaper to buy the development tools for iOS?
Yes, as mentioned above, there is no low latency audio support and the interface has a normal priority instead of high priority which is one of the major reasons why the UI on android phones feels sluggish at times.
Android did not even have a native SDK until recently and you were forced to write everything against the Dalvik JVM.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Yeah, repackaging with malware or scamming users seems to be a major problem with Android. There's trojans and all kinds of nasty stuff, like this trojan repackages popular games and apps, says it's free version and scams the user by sending premium rate SMS to the malware author. Google isn't even really trying to do anything about it, they remove them afterwards when news get out and by then thousands of users have been scammed already. Stuff like that isn't happening on neither Apple's or Microsoft's store.
It's a combination of non-GPU-accelerated interfaces on many Android devices and the fact that Android doesn't provide as robust or helpful a GUI API (transitions, effects, widgets, events, GUI management in general) as iOS.
It simply takes more work to make an app look good on Android, and even then it'll still "feel" worse because everything's being rendered in the CPU.
Not to mention that Android runs interface on normal priority, compared to iOS's high priority. I have no idea why they choose to do it so, because interface speed matters a lot to overall look and feel of the device.
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.
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.
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 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
They've been paid to sit around waiting for it to be posted so he could say something nice about Microsoft. It's officially called "online reputation management" but it's essentially someone who's paid to tote the company line and up-sell the brand. They'll have several accounts and down-mod anyone that speaks ill of the company (or poster) For instance, I'd wager they have a registered account to see the incoming stories and it gives them time to come up with some advertisement for the release post. (AKA, the long post about how Microsoft is great. This one is a "karma bump" that basically tells you what everyone already knows to build up the account karma which they use to get the karma point bonuses so more people view it and down-mod dissenting opinion.)
This is the second account that I'm aware of that these people use (CmdrPony was mentioned as their previous, I do not know of the ones previous). The last account they basically came out and said they will create a new account because someone will eventually karma bomb them by down-voting every post they can to try to reduce the amount of trolling by this account. The new account will build up karma by posting agreeable comments, then start towing the line.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.