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Why Developers Still Prefer iOS To Android

Posted by timothy on from the addictive-chemicals-are-my-theory dept.

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."

45 of 614 comments (clear)

  1. Android has many problems by InsightIn140Bytes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    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 .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.

    1. Re:Android has many problems by InsightIn140Bytes · · Score: 5, Informative

      Here's one article that shows most expensive categories http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/most-expensive-google-adwords-keywords/

      I also remember that some years ago there was lawyers paying really high clicks for some really specific cases. I think it was targeting some people who got major health problems as result of some company. They paid for those clicks really much because the amount of money they got from settlements etc was so good.

    2. Re:Android has many problems by Fallingcow · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Android has many problems by InsightIn140Bytes · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Android has many problems by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Windows Phone market has comparatively more developers, apps and games.

      False.

      And while the amount of users as large as Android or iOS

      False.

      (I won't even bother with references, because it is literally 10 seconds away in Google. Sapienti sat.)

    5. Re:Android has many problems by bonch · · Score: 4, Informative

      The short reason is that Android was first conceived as a Blackberry competitor, with most input coming from a keyboard. High-priority interface responsiveness wasn't as much a concern in that environment. The Android simulator used to look like this. The iPhone came out and blew everyone away, made touchscreens all the rage, and Android changed to compete. The fact 2011 Android interface responsiveness is not competitive with the 2007 iPhone is something of an embarrassment, in my opinion, but the technical foundation was just not designed to deliver that kind of experience, while iOS was designed from the ground up to support it (every interface element is backed by a GPU-accelerated Core Animation layer).

    6. Re:Android has many problems by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The big problem with WP7 today is that it's very hard to write code for it that would be portable to other platforms. With iOS and Android, you can write common code in C or C++, and only need to handle UI differently. In case of games, you pretty much write the whole thing in C++ with a few platform-specific hooks. But WP7 does not support C++, and the only thing it supports - .NET languages - is not well supported by other platforms. Sure, there's MonoTouch and MonoDroid, but they are too expensive - for this market, especially for hobby developers, $400 for each additional platform is a lot.

      Given that WP7 is significantly less popular, in terms of sheer user count, than either Android and iOS, there's no way it can be the first platform being targeted. So, it has to adapt to allow easy porting of code from other, better established mobile platforms, before it can have considerable success with developers.

    7. Re:Android has many problems by Anthony+Mouse · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How does that help you when there is no installed base? Even if every user buys your app, when there are no users you make no sales. On top of that, your points are self defeating: If by some miracle they actually gained some market share then other developers would follow the users, and you would immediately lose the advantage of the lack of competition.

      There is just no incentive to be an early adopter of WP7, which is why it hasn't (and won't) go anywhere. There need to be users before you can get developers, and there need to be developers before you can get users. They need some actual advantage over the existing competition in order to bootstrap, like Apple had with the original iPhone or Google has by making Android free, but now those are the baseline and Microsoft doesn't have anything that can beat them in a sufficiently drastic way to overcome the lack of apps. Plus, nobody likes Microsoft on general principles.

      On top of that, you can throw all of the "Apple is better than Google because diversity sucks" arguments at them: Who wants to promote the establishment of another app store and development platform? All that does is create more work for developers. Why should they promote such wasteful duplication of their own effort by producing apps for a platform that presently has no significant number of users?

    8. Re:Android has many problems by Dynedain · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.....
    9. Re:Android has many problems by loconet · · Score: 5, Informative

      There are a couple of insightful posts by a Google engineer addressing this specific myth. The original reddit comment, where your comment originally came from, generated a very interesting discussion on the subject over at G+.

      --
      [alk]
    10. Re:Android has many problems by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Informative

      There were two, actually - the first one (VS2002 and VS2003) was "C++ with managed extensions" - that was pretty nasty in more ways than one could imagine, and was hastily scrapped. The new one that's still alive (VS2005+) is C++/CLI.

      However, it's important to understand what "compiles to .NET" actually means. VC++ compiler can compile pretty much any random C++ code to IL bytecode, but to do that it needs to use bytecodes which are not memory-safe ("not verifiable", in .NET parlance) - think pointer arithmetics and other such things. IL itself is expressive enough to allow for such things, and the resulting code is architecture-independent, and is JIT-compiled and runs under the VM just the same. So, yes, you can take a C++ library as is, and run it in .NET. The catch is that it cannot be sandboxed. Therefore, it does not run on Windows Phone (or Silverlight), because those only allow for verifiable IL, such that it can be sandboxed.

      Then there's C++/CLI, which is a set of language extensions to C++ that lets you access .NET APIs, and define your own - keywords like "ref class" and "gcnew". If you write code using only those language extensions, you can use /clr:pure compiler switch to request the compiler to produce verifiable, sandboxable IL. That runs on WP7 just fine, but in that mode, you can't use most features of regular C++ - no arrays, no pointers, no regular classes etc. Basically, what you end up with is a subset of C# with more C++-like syntax. Obviously, this is completely useless from portability perspective - you can't run any existing C++ code with this.

      There is a way to use this mode to write code that's portable between WP7 and other platforms if you do it from the get go. I briefly described it in one of my old Slashdot post; basically, the idea is to define a bunch of macros such that they expand, alternatively, to C++/CLI constructs when compiling for WP7, or to regular C++ constructs with identical meaning when compiling for everything else (with a support library for smart pointers, strings and such that matches C++/CLI semantics). You still end up with a rather limited subset of C++ - about as expressive as C# or Java with C++-style templates - but it's actually possible to write something useful in it, and have it run on all platforms. However, this is only applicable to any code that you would be writing yourself there and then - i.e. it doesn't solve the problem with numerous existing C/C++ libraries, and it doesn't solve the problem with porting existing iOS or Android apps. Besides, given the current market penetration of WP7, it is likely still too much effort for too little gain.

    11. Re:Android has many problems by sydneyfong · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Your sig might have something to do with it...........

      --
      Don't quote me on this.
    12. Re:Android has many problems by nschubach · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.
  2. Really Has Nothing to Do with Development by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Really Has Nothing to Do with Development by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    2. Re:Really Has Nothing to Do with Development by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      > 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

    3. Re:Really Has Nothing to Do with Development by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Screw the language. Interface builder rocks. Using XML files with no WYSIWYG editor? Screw that.

      --
      Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
    4. Re:Really Has Nothing to Do with Development by aristotle-dude · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
    5. Re:Really Has Nothing to Do with Development by InsightIn140Bytes · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:Really Has Nothing to Do with Development by bstarrfield · · Score: 5, Informative

      Most of the iOS APIs are derivatives of the very well tested, designed, and readable NS (NextStep) APIs that have been in production for over twenty years. Apple adds new APIs with every release, yet they still follow the design patterns and methodologies of the older application interfaces, making learning new ones quite easy.

      With Objective C finally receiving easier memory management (yes, it was never terribly hard but it was at times frustrating), new developers, especially Java developers, can start rolling out code relatively quickly. As a point of history, Java's developers apparently did look at Objective-C as one of their primary influences. Personally, I find Objective-C much easier to code in then Java, and the clear nature of Apple's APIs combined with very, very strong development tools makes me much prefer iOS development over Android

      There's an added benefit of iOS development which isn't commonly mentioned - it's relatively easy to port iOS code over to Mac OS X, allowing you to reach a broad and lucrative environment, leveraging your previous work.

      --
      /* Dang, I can't type that well. */
    7. Re:Really Has Nothing to Do with Development by hawguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Android vs iOS. The same is happening here with the Android platform having a significantly larger userbase.

      But I think this is more because Android is "free" as in "beer", not "free" as in "free speech".

      Very few people buy Android because they can download the source code for it (some of it), or because they can root it and run a custom version of Android.

      Most people buy it because the device is at a better pricepoint than the iPhone or has features/formfactor that they want.

      I love my Android device, but think IOS is more polished and runs better. But I don't want to give up my keyboard.

  3. Not surprising by bonch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Not surprising by Rennt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm so sick of people getting this wrong. Android is completely free (as in beer). If you want to ship Google Apps you need to certify your device which costs money, but that don't stop the likes of Amazon from shipping millions of devices without paying a dime to Google.

  4. Qt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Qt by Anthony+Mouse · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You shouldn't say "mod this up" in your own post. You actually have an excellent idea, and people who might otherwise mod it up without you telling them to do so will be less inclined to because nobody likes to be told what to do.

    2. Re:Qt by PuZZleDucK · · Score: 4, Funny

      I like moderators.
      Mod this up :)

      --
      Can a person program a new solution to a problem? Why should anyone be able to stop such a thing? -Richard Stallman
  5. Why I only do iOS by tylersoze · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Many reasons why devs did iOS first... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. The REAL reason by WarwickRyan · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  8. I'm the opposite by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:I'm the opposite by jader3rd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Sounds like an argument for why end users "feel" that iOS apps are more polished. End users tend to loathe updates. As a developer I completly see the value in your statement, but I can also see the point of view of people who don't want updates.

    2. Re:I'm the opposite by whisper_jeff · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So you use Android consumers as beta testers while you iron out the bugs in a rushed, poorly tested product?

      I know I'm going to be modded troll but, sorry, that's what your "interesting" post sounds like - you prefer to release to Android first because you can quickly and rapidly fix problems rather than taking the time to properly build and test your app before releasing it into the market.

      I'm even going to go one step further in my near-trollish commentary: you're one of the reasons that Android users are less inclined to actually spend money on an app because developers likely rush them out whereas iOS developers take extra time to make sure it's "just right" before putting it out because it's such a headache to fix problems. iOS users are more confident in a reliable app while Android users are faced with buggy initial releases. I don't know, call me crazy (or a troll, as you wish), but I wouldn't rush out to spend money on an Android app if your view is indicative of the majority of Android developers....

    3. Re:I'm the opposite by maccodemonkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    4. Re:I'm the opposite by Kenshin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Old man alert (and I'm only in my 30s):

      I'm sorry, but "developers" today are fucking spoiled little children.

      Back 15 years ago, before the net was completely widespread, everything shipped on DISK. Floppy, CD, whatever. You had to get get your code right, because if there were bugs, you had to send out service packs on disk too.

      Complaining about having to go through Apple's "lengthy" review process is a laugh. Oh no, you wanna send out updates of your app several times a day? Maybe you need better coding standards.

      --

      Does it make you happy you're so strange?

  9. Re:Rich Users by Kenshin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  10. I'm guessing the following... by RanceJustice · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I'm guessing the following... by wilson_c · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The best thing about being inside the walled garden is that it muffles the sound of all the sanctimonious twits whining endlessly because they attach ethical judgements to to the most tedious of consumer choices.

  11. Re:Hey hold on there... by bonch · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Where did you get this statement from, or are you just trolling? Did you forget those folks like me who treasure freedom to do as I please [with my gadget], not as some pundit at Apple thinks I should do?

    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.

    Here we go again...Do products like Chrome or Gmail make Google any cash? Why do [uninformed] people like you always think Google must make cash from Android in a particular way like Apple does from its iOS?

    Because that's how a business works?

    Has Google ever put a number on how much it makes from its advertising?

    Of course. Google shares those figures annually. Advertising is about 97% of their revenue, which is over $8 billion.

    From Android, Google makes cash indirectly...through advertising and its doing quite well. In fact better than iOS.

    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.

  12. I agree with Google on this one by Thorizdin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  13. one word: consistency by ZeroExistenZ · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  14. The Desktop Mirror by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  15. Android Market Problems by JohnG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  16. Odd definition of Open by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  17. Re:Mod topic as flamebait? by miltonw · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  18. Money by codepunk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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