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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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
It's not flamebait. It's based on a study by Flurry Analytics showing that Android developer share has declined by more than one-third in the last year. Apparently, refuting the Eric Schmidt with hard numbers is now "flamebait" because happens to be negative news about Android.
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.
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.
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.
The API. There's a ton of shit you can one-line in iOS that you'll have to write yourself in Android, or drag in 3rd party libraries.
Once you get past development, every stage after that's easier too. Testing? Easier. Putting it in the store? Easier (only one to worry about rather than several). Push messaging? Well-supported through a single vendor (Apple) rather than poorly supported through several. Want to add in-app purchasing? No problem.
For professional developers Android is, frankly, a pain in the ass. The only way it's better is if you're a hobbyist, and even then... I think I'd rather pay the $100.
No, actually Objective-C was the worst part of it. Most of the code I wrote was in C++ and I only used Obj-c for the necessary API interaction. It is as Bucky24 says, the integration of their interface builder with the development process. Like I said, writing for Android was not bad, but IMO Apple have a clear edge.
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
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
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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Wait. The front web page of Flurry says "FLURRY: Introducing a game-changing marketing approach to build your iOS audience more effectively." So, they target Flurry for iOS and then find that most of their developers use iOS. And this is worthy of any notice?
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.
What the hell have you been doing, converting the bits into morse code and sending them to google via telegraph?
A casual purchase on Android is faster than a casual purchase on iOS. It takes precisely 2 clicks to make a purchase (vs iOS's 3), and 1 click to make a refund.
I accidentally purchased an app and refunded it just now to check these numbers because I thought it would ask me confirmation one more time, but no.
"We only know that IDevices are usually used by total retards that can be tricked into giving all their money to *everything*."
Oh trust me. The feeling is mutual.
Flurry analytics are free. Flurry make their money from advertisers. Android is more of a platform for ad-supported software than iPhone. So what's your theory for the bias towards iPhone in Flurry's stats? All things being equal the bias ought to be the other way.
I think you might have just explained the results without even realizing it.
Is Flurry Analytics not a thing that competes with Google Analytics? Because I could kind of see how Google would be better able to promote Google Analytics to Android developers more easily than to iOS developers, which would take them disproportionally out of Flurry's numbers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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"
The more and more people who take up iPhone programming, the less and less obscure Objective C grows. This argument is beginning to wear thin, especially with numbers like this:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
"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."
Then learning another language should honestly not be that big of a deal. Java was based on Obj-C. It's not like they're worlds apart. They're pretty much the same once you get used to the brackets. Memory is even automatically managed these days. (And if you already know C, you really should not be complaining at all.)
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
Apple and Google are neck and neck in terms of absolute app downloads. But what I meant was again "selling" in terms of making money. Far more apps downloaded on iOS are purchased apps (to my mind a free app is not really a "sale").
I don't really see Androids numbers compared to Apple increasing much more as WP7 starts to eat into Android market share next year. Laugh all you want but you'll remember what I said a year from now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley