With Respect To Gaming, Android Still Lags Behind iOS (bgr.com)

An anonymous reader writes: No matter what you think about the Android/iOS divide from either a hardware or software perspective, there's simply no getting around the fact that many developers still take an iOS-first approach with respect to app development. With games, where development costs are already sky-high, the dynamic is even more pronounced. For instance, one of the most addictive, successful, and highly rated apps currently available on the App Store is a great snowboarding game called Alto's Adventure. It was originally released this past February for the iPhone and iPad (and now the Apple TV). Still today, nine months after its initial release, an Android version of the app remains non-existent. Now if you're an Android user who happens to enjoy mobile gaming, it's easy to see how this dynamic playing out over and over again can quickly become an endless source of frustration.

Comments

Why?

[mwvdlee]

Is iOS simply more profitable?
Is Android harder to program or support?
Is code easily portable?
Do iOS devices have more hardware resources?

Re:Why?

[Pieroxy]

I think your first two points are the reason. People using iOS are far more likely to actually PAY for a game (or any other app for that matter). The fact that the iOS platform is far more homogeneous (At any point in time you have to cover 2 versions of the OS, three tablets and three phones to address 90+% of iOS users) make also development costs lower. Lower costs, higher profits, yes, the iOS platform is most likely an order of magnitude more profitable than Android.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that...
Yes, it is more profitable. Higher % or users who pay for apps, more difficulty to install "non-store" apps.
No, it is not that harder to program or support. Android device and version fragmentation is higher, but imho this is not that painful at all.
Almost as portable (due to fragmentation basically).
No, they do not necessarily have more HW resources, but there is a small number of devices, therefore device-specific optimization is possible in iOS (not in Android, with thousands of devices with different specs).

By the way, portability and support is almost completely solved and managed by game development frameworks, such as Unity (the most popular option nowadays).

I think the main advantages are that it's easier to target and optimize a higher % of devices in iOS, but specially the abruptly higher revenues of games in iOS comapred to Android (ehem...piracy...ehem).

Re:Why?

[jareth-0205]

As an Android developer of the last 6 years, my opinion:

Is iOS simply more profitable?

In a word - yes. Android users tend not to buy apps directly, iOS there seems to be an acceptance that most good apps will be paid, and Android most apps are free. If you can get money out of the user in a different way (eg subscriptions made elsewhere) it seems more even, but as for mobile purchases, the culture around Apple is more willing.

Is Android harder to program or support? Is code easily portable?

There are different challenges certainly but all the teams I've worked in have moved at about the same speed. The myth that Android is hard to program doesn't bear-out in reality. I think libraries like Unity mean there are even less platform differences in games than with plan apps.

Do iOS devices have more hardware resources?

No, top-end Androids usually have more power than current iPhones, but iPhones are more homogenous, which makes tuning easier. Also they don't stick around as long (partly because Apple upgrade them into uselessness) so I think the average iPhone is newer than the average Android.

Re:Why?

[jellomizer]

Is iOS more profitable: iOS are often known as premium system. So they have some extra money they want to pay for this preseved premium. So they will be more willing to pay for such apps. Plus many are still from the iPod days and still have an account to the Apple Store to get their music. Android users are less likely to pay for an app and not give out financial data again.

Is android harder to support: iPhone and iPad are the biggest brand of any one company. Android has a bunch of manufactures and different sizes and specs. Not that it is a bad thing, but for game developers having a smaller set of requirements makes it easier to make an optimized game.

Is code portable: In games not so much. Portability is a performance trade off. For those boring B2B apps no big deal as you can just put more money into a faster back end. But for games most of the work in on your device, and split second lags in a game are noticeable and annoying. So they need optimized code.

Does iOS have more hardware resources? Yes and no. When a device is released it is top of the line. Next month and the months following competitors release their newest stuff which is more advance then apple. There may be some advantages Apple keeps but hardware specs fluctuates compared to the others. However apples smaller product line means less of a difference between. The end of support iPhone 4s and the newly coming iPhone 6s. While low end androids may be comparable to the iPhone 3G and the high end ones on par if not better then the 6s

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

or 5/ is apple paying developers not to release products for Android? (hint: they were caught paying the developers of plants vs. zombies not to release a version for android)

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is iOS simply more profitable?

For many measures of this yes.

iOS has a much higher percentage of paid (either up front or In App Purchase) revenue, and much higher average revenue per user.

Android revenue by comparison has a much higher proportion of Ad supported, which on a App basis is much lower per device.

Is Android harder to program or support?

Yes to both. With iOS you can nail 90% of devices in sticking to n and n-1 OS version feature sets, and a handful of screen sizes (3.5", 4",4.7",5.5", 7.9", 9.7", and 12.9") which really collapse to 4 sizes logically (narrow + standard for width & height), so your full test matrix is maybe 10 devices.

With Android, there are in excess of 15,000 different devices , and you need to deal with n, n-1, n-2, n-3, n-4 at the moment. Google Play Services helps a bit, but the plethora of CPU and GPU options still makes its hard to broadly test.

It's easier to just pick say Samsung as a target, but that then cuts your potential market.

Is code easily portable?

It may not be.

Do iOS devices have more hardware resources?

Yes. The two platforms are very different from a resources perspective.

iOS CPUs are fewer cores and more powerful per core. Android CPU have 2-4 x the number of cores, but net net end up around the same overall performance. Games in particular tend to be largely single threaded, or at least few threaded, so fewer more powerful cores often suits gaming working sets better in the CPU.

iOS GPU are usually significantly more powerful than what ships in Android , and the spectrum of GPU performance is huge on iOS (about 300:1 between the slowest & fastest iOS devices). iOS devices are PS3 ish in GPU capability.

Apple matches GPU capacity to the PPI resolution of the screen. Many flagship Androud devices have shipped with insane screen PPI, that the GPU and VRAM simply can't keep up with.

Apple ships much less RAM on average as it has fewer cores, an OS that aggressively removes resources from background processes , and expects developers to use the frameworks it provides , rather than rely on large third party frameworks (that consume RAM). This means porting can be hard as the memory pressure on the two platforms is completely different. Apple provides OpenGL, Metal, and aggressively supports GPU offload with GCD and OpenCL., that all help high performance graphics and visualization with lower memory pressure.

Finally , Apple has done a much better job of thermal design - iOS devices can run flat out for much longer than many Android devices, which need to back off from their peak CPU/GPU performance to manage thermal issues.

Re:Why?

[DrXym]

I expect the main reason is there are only a handful of iOS devices to worry about, predominantly sold in a handful of core countries. Compared to the multitude of Android devices sold all over the place. It probably represents a smaller risk and development effort even if the Android game ends up being the long tale that sustains the game when it does get ported.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

But you're not mentioning the elephant in the room.

You can build and test and iOS app on 3-4 devices and get excellent coverage of the ~dozen devices that actually exist, which are basically the same hardware.

There are 100s of Android devices, all with wildly different hardware specs. Just covering the most popular gives you about 25 devices to test, and every one of them will have family-specific bugs to iron out. That's before you can even really say you have "an android app". Never mind supporting the guy who has some shitty Chinese palmtop you never even heard of before.

Plus, in 2015, you still can't find much information about programming Android in fucking C++. The platform was built for Java, with C++ as a total afterthought. It's a complete fucking mess. And a lot of hardware-specific shit finds its way down here too.

The problem is, Android simply isn't a platform within the commonly understood meaning of the word. It's a free OS kernel that entices hardware developers to put all the Google apps onto their devices in the factory. And the progress of Android towards being a platform in the required sense is glacial to non-existent.

<sarcasm>But yeah, if you defer all your tech to Unity, obviously these problems are already solved. Duh.</sarcasm>

Re:Why?

[jareth-0205]

There are 100s of Android devices, all with wildly different hardware specs. Just covering the most popular gives you about 25 devices to test, and every one of them will have family-specific bugs to iron out.

Yeah yeah, change the record. If you think this is a big issue then you have never programmed for Windows / web / any operating system that isn't the very brief device-limited situation that iOS is lucky enough to be in. Think how many devices there is possible on the desktop? But we don't whine about that because it's normal there. I suspect you're not a developer, because there is no way that "every" device has specific bugs to work around. That is entirely the point of an operating system... Device bugs happen occasionally but I can count on one hand in my career the times I've had to do it.

Re:Why?

[fluffernutter]

Actually from what I see, iOS is more popular with kids, who are more likely to have money to spend on games themselves or have parents that are willing to throw them a couple bucks to shut them up. iOS is not the 'premium' OS as people say, it is the OS for grade-schoolers.

Re:Why?

[MightyYar]

But with Windows, you have no choice because it is installed on 90+ percent of all PCs. If you want to reach more than a few Mac users you need to write for Windows. Android does not have that position. If you are a game company, Apple still commands the vast majority of actual paying app buyers and most Android devices are the low-end variety that don't make great gaming devices. So, sure, a developer COULD support Android - but at greater cost and for lower return than iOS.

Re: Why?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yeah there may be a million more Android users than iOS users but a good chunk of those are still on gingerbread or Froyo even and infested with exploits. It's hard to do tech support for a $3 app when the platform is probably at fault. Google is actually hurting its revenue picture on the app side by encouraging the abandonment of older devices through its policies. Android is popular enough now that Google really could tell the carriers the way it's going to be like Apple has been doing. It's a shame they're squandering that commercial capital this far into the game. On the other hand who wants to put 5 million dollars into an app only to have Apple's capricious censors reject it?

They have the two best options right now but neither of them are creating as functional, dynamic, and profitable a market as they could be.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, no. Really, no. You got that backwards.

Re:Why?

[jareth-0205]

Not denying that it's a valid business choice - just the concept that it's apparently the end of the development world to have to support more devices than you physically can have. That's demonstrably fine for all client development that isn't iOS.

Re:Why?

[GuB-42]

According to John Carmack, that's basically the first two.
When asked about Android, he usually complains about the poor native (C++) code support compared to iOS and the consoles. Java works well but game developers typically prefer native code for performance reasons. Quote : "It has been a couple months since I said this. I hate the Android mixed java / native build environment SO MUCH."
Back in 2011, when he considered porting Rage to Android, he also mentioned maket limitations (probably gone by now) and the fact there is more money in the iOS world. Quote : "When I asked [the crowd at Quakecom] how many people had spent 20 bucks on a game in the Android store, there was a big difference [to iOS]."

Re: Why?

[Karlt1]

They were "caught"? Since when has it been an industry secret that platform owners give incentives to publishers for exclusives? Google is not exactly struggling, it could easily do the same.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

They were "caught" because they deny that such a program exists and instead say that developers prefers iOS because of other reasons.

Re: Why?

[jofas]

Your numbers are very creative: - iOS only captured 47.5 of 341.5 million in Q2 2015 (http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp) - Froyo and Gingerbread account for only 4% of total Android version together (http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html) - Average devel cost of iOS *or* Android app is closer to $100K, and that's for companies with the cash to throw at it. (http://www.comentum.com/mobile-app-development-cost.html)

Re:Why?

[Dog-Cow]

Slashdotters living in basements have a slightly skewed worldview. You may have noticed.

Re:Why?

[shigutso]

Yeah, because there's only one version of Windows.
Nope.
Just an example, when Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released, Ahead Nero had to release an emergency update because their CD burning software simply stopped working on XPSP2, which worked just fine on XPSP1.

Developing for Android is as easy as developing for Windows. Maybe even easier for Android.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, no. Really, no. You got that backwards.

Yes the fart apps on IOS are much more powerful and expensive than the ones on Android!

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very simple: Objective-C runs natively. Android code runs in the Dalvik (Java) platform, which means a layer of bytecode translation, and the performance losses it takes to do the context shifts between native ARM and Java. iOS also uses the GPU for the UI, which adds gains.

Everyonw knows how slow Java is. Watch an applet pop up on an old website on your browser with Java in it. Enough said.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The last point is also relevant. Apple has historically put much more graphics processing power, and much more single core performance in its chip designs than Android manufacturers have. Both of those are important for games, the former for obvious reasons, the latter because generating command buffers for OpenGL takes a lot of processing power on a single core of these devices (just for the GL driver). That great single core performance on iOS lets you make more draw calls.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the HW resources point *is* valid. iOS devices typically are *much* faster at single core performance (which becomes very important for mobile games when it comes to submitting a bunch of OpenGL draw calls on a single thread), and typically have very high end GPUs. On iOS you can rely on having great hardware for games, on Android there's a good chance that a device has either 1) a crap GPU, 2) a crap driver 3) a slow CPU 4) a CPU that's "fast" but only because it has 8 cores.

Re:Why?

[west]

It certainly doesn't help when (as I witnessed) a salesman tried to persuade someone to drop the iPhone they were considering buying and buy a Samsung using the sales line "With iPhone, you have to buy your apps. With Android, everyone gets them for free.."

There's an eye-opening amount of piracy on iPhone (I was amazed at the numbers), but from what I've read from developers and the numbers in general, it pales in comparison with the piracy rates on Android.

The idea that a large number of people pirate at 0.99 puts lie to the old canard "if you make it cheap and convenient enough, people will buy instead of pirate".

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

No really, the iPhone 6S's dual core processor equals the galaxy S6's quad core even on geekbench multithreaded. In terms of single threaded performance, the iPhone is nearly twice as fast.

For games, it's single core performance that matters, because one of your cores is always going to be jammed up issuing OpenGL draw calls.

The practice of the situation is that on iOS you can reliably issue 300 OpenGL draw calls per frame - 3000 if you use Metal. On Android, you'll only get about 150, even on very high end devices.

Re: Why?

[Maury Markowitz]

> iOS only captured 47.5 of 341.5 million in Q2 2015

That's an interesting graph for a number of reasons, but what caught my eye in particular is that the iOS and Android lines are an exact mirror image of each other. iOS clearly sells as a gift item, and its xmas-season upticks appear to cause an Android downturn.

And that actually doesn't make sense. If Android is the sort of go-to system for someone "just buying a phone", as opposed to "buying a present", I wouldn't think iOS sales would have any effect at all. After all, my phones have never demonstrated a tendency to die over the gifting season.

Of course that's IDC...

Re:Why?

[Shados]

Its kind of scary how when I google for an app for android, for reviews or something, I have to wade through all the pirate site links. Often, the legitimate links are several entries below the pirate links.

And yeah, there's a lot of people at this point (and not FOSS zealots), who will just not pay for software.

At the office, I'm always seeing people who make 150k+ a year balk at the idea of paying 10 bucks for a piece of software they use every day in their side projects, and they pirate it instead. Paying for a mobile app? Impossible!

Re:Why?

[gyroheli]

I think you took his second point the wrong way, feature wise you can support Kitkat for android and that'll cover ~70% of users or something like that. Sure that's not the newest version and there won't be material design but it is a good enough starting place, to then later add a specific version for the newest version. For games i think those features matter even less, what you'll probably need the most is the graphics API which doesn't really change from version to version of a mobile OS. I think he was referring to development hell for Android, specifically for native applications. It's in a pretty bad state, you can't even program in C/C++ without having to make Java calls to access Android specific features. Accessing APK resources from native? Nope gotta make a Java call from native which is really ugly to do. No standard library is officially supported, they are all essentially use at your own risk. It's really shitty how much effort Google is putting on the Java side of Android, going to lengths as implementing their own JVM compared to how little they care about Native. It's only been possible to compile native code in Android Studio recently, even then it's still experimental.

Re:Why?

[Maury Markowitz]

> programmed for Windows / web / any operating system

I don't know, programming for Windows any time in the last 12 years has been pretty much flat. I could accuse you of being just as unfamiliar as the person you're replying too.

The web, sure, that's another matter. But then your argument boils down to "it's OK for programming on Android to be difficult, because it is on the web too". That's not much of an argument.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think this is a big issue then you have never programmed for Windows / web / any operating system that isn't the very brief device-limited situation that iOS is lucky enough to be in.

You don't program Android then.

Think how many devices there is possible on the desktop?

Yes, and you know the innovation that makes this possible? The Windows platform (or, to a lesser extent, the Linux one). Android is not such a platform which is, you know, the entire fucking point of my post.

I suspect you're not a developer

I've been programming since you were in diapers you little fucktard, and you clearly have zero Android experience on which to judge my expertise. I've delivered a million-selling game on both iOS and Android, you presumably just read about operating systems on Buzzfeed the other day.

Re: Why?

[CastrTroy]

Those numbers you pointed to show the entire problem. The version with the highest number of devices is currently 4.4 (Kitkat) with 37.8%. It was relesed 2 years ago. Then there's 4 other versions with between 10% and 15% of the users each. Only 26% of users are on Version 5 or above. And it was released over a year ago. There might not be a lot of users on Gingerbread, but I'm sure there's a lot of devices on the shelf or on the trash heap that users have simply abandoned because they' won't run newer software, even if the hardware is perfectly capable.

Re:Why?

[Merk42]

Yeah, because there's only one version of Windows. Nope. Just an example, when Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released, Ahead Nero had to release an emergency update because their CD burning software simply stopped working on XPSP2, which worked just fine on XPSP1. Developing for Android is as easy as developing for Windows. Maybe even easier for Android.

Which would be no different from an app needing to be updated for Android 6.0
The point was that a large variance in hardware is not an excuse.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

But you're not mentioning the elephant in the room.

You can build and test and iOS app on 3-4 devices and get excellent coverage of the ~dozen devices that actually exist, which are basically the same hardware.

Wait... I think I've heard this somewhere before... let's see...

No, top-end Androids usually have more power than current iPhones, but iPhones are more homogenous, which makes tuning easier. Also they don't stick around as long (partly because Apple upgrade them into uselessness) so I think the average iPhone is newer than the average Android.

Emphasis added. Because he quite literally did mention the particular issue you're referring to.

Re:Why?

[UnknowingFool]

If you think this is a big issue then you have never programmed for Windows / web / any operating system that isn't the very brief device-limited situation that iOS is lucky enough to be in.

But we're not talking about Windows or web are we? For Android, there are simply more devices to test and more variation in hardware. For some apps, hardware differences don't matter that much. For gaming though, hardware differences do come into play. Screen differences alone are one variation that game developers have to deal with.

Re: Why?

[AmiMoJo]

a good chunk of those are still on gingerbread or Froyo even

Which is of course horse shit. A mere 4% of users are on pre-4.0 versions of the OS, and their devices are likely not powerful enough to run any game that actually cares about API features from later versions.

Android had over 80% of the market in 2014, and rising. Even if any given Android user spends only 1/5th as much on apps, it's still as lucrative as iOS.

Finding a few games that are not out on Android means nothing. There are popular Android games not out on iOS. There are many games that can never come out on iOS due to content restrictions. The reasons why games don't always come out on every platform are complex, and looking at the AAA titles that are available on Android it's obvious that there is no problem developing or making money on the platform.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

ROTFL.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

(partly because Apple upgrade them into uselessness) so I think the average iPhone is newer than the average Android.
 
This claim has been debunked numerous times. This kind of FUD is what makes me wonder why I should bother to listen to anything else the OP has to say.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Follow the money.

iOS users buy apps. Android users whine about wanting ports of iOS apps, and then they steal them.

Re:Why?

[kbg]

I think it's the following:

1) Fragmentation of Android platforms. You not only have to test for all the different versions of Android you also have to test on different vendors platforms.
2) The Android SDK is constantly changing on a massive scale and things are being deprecated left and right with almost no downward compatibility, so making a simple app and updating it with fixes becomes an enormous task. Y constantly have throw away code and rewrite and redesign your app when you upgrade the SDK.
3) There are ridiculous amount of bugs present the Android platform, and some of these bugs have never been fixed because they belong to an older version of the Android platform which has been abandoned.

Given all this, programming an app for Android is a total nightmare.

Re:Why?

[jareth-0205]

My argument boils down to "Programming is difficult". And if you want any sort of variation in hardware then you're going to have to deal with that variation, or is the One True Apple Solution the only thing that we can aspire to, the only possible client device because we programmers want an easy life?

And yet, it's not that difficult, as I've said before I haven't noticed any difference in speed of development (or burden of maintenance) in the projects I've been working on, so the whole thing is moot.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point was that iOS's perceived ease is the edge case that in no way reflects development in other environments. (the price you pay is of course the stranglehold sandbox and limited HW access. Remind me how AP spoof detection apps run on iphones again? Oh right...)

I would also make it a point to say Android SDK build tools make it easy to target 95% of all androids in use. Don't blame google if developers can't function without the latest 3rd party frameworks that were only ever built for and tested with the latest and greatest release.

Re:Why?

[interval1066]

Java call from native which is really ugly to do...

Not really, you call your C API from a jni layer, big deal. What's so messy about that? The bigger problem in my mind are 1) Everything has a version you need to be aware of, from the api to java itself to the vm to external libraries to widgets, which is typical in development but its really kind of hairy with android. Still, development is possible. I've written a few android apps, its certainly doable. But calling an api from and ndk library through JNI is hardly "ugly", its not even a big deal. Google has chosen Java as its platform language. That's how you access native code from a java code base; JNI. Its not ugly, just the way it is.

Re:Why?

[tepples]

If you want to reach more than a few Mac users you need to write for Windows.

Unless your game studio is established enough to qualify for the PlayStation partner program. If so, you can reach users across all PlayStation platforms.

Re:Why?

[tepples]

Have you tried reporting the pirate links to the application's developer so that the developer can forward a Notice of Claimed Infringement to the pirate site or to the pirate site's ISP?

Re:Why?

[pastafazou]

You've hit the nail on the head. Kids and iPods aren't ever factored in to the 'smartphone market share' numbers, but my guess is 50%+ of the iOS sales are actually kids on iPods. I'm basing this guess on the behaviors of my 5 kids, 3 of which have iPods and regularly spend money on them, and the two oldest have Android phones and have never spent a penny on purchases.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem has less to do with device OS and hardware and more to do with the respective app store policies and sales model. Also, check your facts: there are exactly 0 devices that shipped with Gingerbread capable of running KitKat.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot. ART compiles to native ARM code specific to the SoC used on the device.

Re:Why?

[tepples]

What percentage of Android devices even uses ART by default, rather than Dalvik?

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

As Ballmer once blatted:

Altivec, Altivec, Altivec!

And other trademarked blather.

Apple is the only platform that floats on a big cloud of hype. That you only smell if you stop yabbeering about.

And people wonder why nerds hate fucking Apple...

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

People who choose for user names ancient memes referring to Apple icons from the 1980s are rather out of touch from the mainstream.

I mean for fuck's sake! That means they are probably one of the tards who used the shitball that classic MacOS was all the way to the bitter end when NeXT bought Apple and shitcanned the bag of turds and tricks that MacOS had grown into.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, if you reframed your discussion in the context of Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8 a few years ago, you'd be in the same boat. Yet oddly there were tons of Windows games being released every year and Mac OS X gaming lagged behind (if games were released for it at all). Clearly in both cases, you could just target the oldest version (Jelly Bean/XP) and cover 90+% of users. So that's obviously not the issue. What would likely be the issue is instead that Android games are generally expected to be cheap and often are paid exclusively on ad support. That alone limits what sort of games are likely to be on the platform. Versioning is very much a moot point.

Re:Why?

[tehcyder]

Have you tried reporting the pirate links to the application's developer so that the developer can forward a Notice of Claimed Infringement to the pirate site or to the pirate site's ISP?

I thought piracy was OK because it gave free publicity to the creator, and didn't cost them any money because the person pirating wouldn't have bought it anyway, and you'll pay full price for it if it's any good after you've played it a few times, and copyright is evil on principle in the first place?

Or does that only apply to music and movies and other things that most people here only consume rather than create?

Re: Why?

[s_p_oneil]

As someone who has worked as a developer for a few small games on both platforms (this was back in the Android 2.0 - 3.0 days), I can say that hands-down iOS was MUCH quicker to develop a "finished" product that works well on all devices. The OS version matters only a tiny bit. What matters a lot more is manufacturer, screen size, resolution, aspect ratio, etc. Some specific Android devices had issues initializing OpenGL ES (causing it to work great on 9 phone models but crash on the 10th), different models supported different OpenGL extensions, and so on. Even creating a nice background image for a 2D game on Android was way more of a pain than it should've been. Refer to the ridiculous aspect ratio of the early Motorola Droids, which was wider than any other cell phone at the time, and ended up with blank space on either edge of your background (or stretched it into something ugly) if you didn't add special logic or assets just to deal with Motorola because they wanted to be "special". That wasn't the only problem caused by having too many manufacturers wanting to make their phone seem "better" by being different, just one of many.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that actually doesn't make sense. If Android is the sort of go-to system for someone "just buying a phone", as opposed to "buying a present", I wouldn't think iOS sales would have any effect at all. After all, my phones have never demonstrated a tendency to die over the gifting season.

Of course that's IDC...

It makes perfect sense as the graph is in percentage of the market not absolute shipments. Because of this, fluctuations in Android and iOS shipments will affect each other in the way shown. What you are seeing is an increase in iOS sales which increases the size of the market. If Android sales stay flat then their share of the market will decrease.

Re:Why?

[macs4all]

Is iOS simply more profitable? Is Android harder to program or support? Is code easily portable? Do iOS devices have more hardware resources?

In Order:

Yes.

Yes

Depends

Not necessarily "more"; but certainly "more predictable"

Re:Why?

[Type44Q]

Is iOS simply more profitable?

Perhaps Android users aren't dumb and/or impulsive enough to fork out for crude graphics on postage stamp-sized screens.

/ducks :p

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because, 1 hour after I post an update of my game to the Google Play Store, it's up on the pirates sites. Android users don't pay so it's a waste of time.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android had over 80% of the market in 2014, and rising.

Because the android handset makers are struggling to make a profit, and thus flooding the market with a multitude of cheap also-rans that they can sell cheaply to gain market share.

Even if any given Android user spends only 1/5th as much on apps, it's still as lucrative as iOS.

Which completely flies in the face of reality: Apple's share of mobile market profits is 92%. How long do you imagine that Android handset makers will continue selling their products at a loss, and flooding the market in an effort to "make it up in volume"?

Re:Why?

[Solandri]

The network usage numbers back this up too. Every pro-Apple site seemed to crow over the NetMarketShare stats showing iOS having roughly twice the browser traffic of Android. The reality was that Android passed iOS web traffic in 2013. How can that be? NetMarketShare (Net Applications) tracks a relatively small sample of sites (about 40,000), and only counts individual visits in a month. So when they said iOS traffic exceeded Android traffic by nearly 2x, what they meant was there were 2x as many unique iOS visitors as unique Android visitors in a month. StatCounter tracks over 3 million sites and counts page hits - i.e. actual traffic volume. By their measurements Android passed iOS around 2013, and is currently at about 2.5x iOS traffic volume.

In other words, back when twice as many iOS users browsed the web than Android users, each browsing Android user generated more than 2x as much traffic as the typical iOS user. Combine this with the mobile device market share stats (roughly 80% Android) and the complete picture you get is: The vast majority of Android users never browse the web. iOS users occasionally browse the web (I wouldn't call them all kids, just light or occasional users). A small group of Android users - the "premium" users - browse the web heavily on their devices, much more heavily than iOS users.

Note: Net Applications finally showed Android passing iOS in mid-2014. So now not only does more web browsing come from Android, but more unique visitors as well. Of course you probably never heard about that happening because the press has a strong pro-Apple bias and rarely publishes anything which casts Apple in a bad light. Just like you never heard about the iPad losing tablet market share until it dropped below 50%, even though it was obvious for 2 years that was happening if you were tracking the quarterly statistics.

Re:Why?

[jellomizer]

Sure it would be more popular with Kids, because it is the platform with all the games. Back in them good old days before mobile devices, parents gave kids designer name brand clothing, shoes designed for sport stars, and that Cabbage Patch Kid better have that logo somewhere or your child will be shamed. The fact that kids use it doesn't mean it is less premium, but the fact the parents are willing to pay extra so their kids can have the best, and not be ridiculed for not being on top of the latest name brands.
Yes I am a bit traumatized from my childhood, but I think my point still stands.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Users might be more willing to fork over money on iOS. When I had a Mac, I noticed that free software on Windows required a purchase on Macs.

Re:Why?

[ilsaloving]

While I understand what you're trying to say, I argue that there's a fundamental flaw in your analogy.

The difference between windows and android is that windows is a) (More or less) stable, b) You have options to fix problems, and c) people are *used* to having to deal with problems, so when a problem happens people arn't surprised. They just roll their eyes and grunt "Great, not again..."

With android, as an end user you are stuck with what you got. There's (generally) no such thing as modding your android device. Hell, there's an excellent chance that you won't even get point releases for your OS, *even when* you bought your device from one of the major manufacturers, so you can forget about OS fixes, driver updates, etc.

Additionally, you say that people don't complain when their desktop games have issues. That's incorrect. I was having trouble getting Fallout 3 to run stable in a Windows VM, and while researching the causes I found a shockingly number of issues, many of which required going into the games config files to change the number of simultaneous threads, changing the amount of physical memory in the machine, etc. The difference here is that if you have problems on your desktop, there is a good chance that it's *fixable*. You may need to take extreme steps, but there is usually a way to work around whatever problem you're having.

For Android? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. End of story. All you can do is complain to the dev and hope they can fix the problem, and won't just update the app description with "This game/app won't work on device X".

As a developer, in the desktop world, if your game is having a strange graphics issue, you don't go to Microsoft. You go to the graphics chip manufacturer because of possible bugs in the driver.
If your game doesn't work on the EU version of Samsung Galaxy S4, what do you do? Complain to samsung? Dig through spec sheets to find out what graphics chip samsung happened to use for that particular SKU, and then hope beyond hope you can even talk to chip manufacturer for help, assuming that Samsung didn't make proprietary tweaks to the base driver code, or possible something even more esoteric?

As long as you stick with major manufacturers, and use a toolkit like Unity, then the likelyhood of this happening is pretty remote. But I've already learned the hard way that using a generic android device from a non-major manufacturer just takes you into a world of pain.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

iOS is more profitable. iOS users statistically are more willing to pay for apps than Android users who generally look for free alternatives. iOS users spend up to 4x more on apps than Android users.

http://bgr.com/2015/04/15/ios-vs-android-developers-revenue-apps/

There are also far less devices to ensure compatibility with on iOS. Supporting them all is far easier.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

False... My iPad 2 (2011) runs iOS 9.x...
cheers

Re: Why?

[jratcliffe]

iOS spikes higher in 4Q because Apple typically releases the new iPhone in late 3Q/early 4Q, so there's a lot of seasonality to the sales. Android devices, on the other hand, are more evenly spread through the year.

Re:Why?

[jareth-0205]

Sorry, should have been more explicit: when I talked about "people not complaining" I mean "developers not complaining" (Well, we do, but dealing with this stuff is part of the job). I feel like you rather prove my point though - whenever you have customisable hardware you have occasional problems and even mature Windows has it.

But you're right in that you have less scope to fix things - atleast there's Cyanogen et al, but still not the same as messing in the registry or Linux scripts to work around an issue. Unfortunately ARM platform isn't as standardised as x86.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the cell phone companies are hosing people on data prices (visitors from the UK can apparently get 25 gigs from AT&T for a fair price). People who go for a cheap no data plan will probably be using Android (though they might be using WiFi to browse the web as well).

Re: Why?

[rsborg]

There are popular Android games not out on iOS. There are many games that can never come out on iOS due to content restrictions.

Some claims that require citations. Care to share? Please leave out games that are functional equivalents to iOS editions.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aaaand you're anonymous for a reason. We get that. Just try not to be so blatantly stupid about it and it may pass without comment.

Re: Why?

[greenfruitsalad]

a few months ago i watched a part of an interview with a CTO of a navigation software company (they have apps for ios/android/blackberry/wp8). i think it was Sygic but i'm not sure now. he said 92% of all android installations of their software were pirated vs a completely negligible percentile on iOS. they get telemetry data from the app so they know exact numbers. he also said that historically, the worst piracy was on symbian.

if i was getting such levels of piracy on my app, i'd just give up on that platform. with android 4.1, google announced paid applications will have apks encrypted with device specific keys so they can't be pirated but this is either not being used by many apps or somehow being circumvented. perhaps somebody could enlighten me?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to my 4S. It is now a paperweight, because even directly after a full reset it could not perform the simplest of functions on iOS 9 without constant stutter and crashing.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot.

What he said. You are doubly an idiot for thinking that the Java Web Plugin is somehow a representation of Java as whole. Applets are slow because Applets are shit, which everybody has known for like 15 years. Meanwhile, 'real' Java continues to be employed to great effect in developing huge enterprise systems, where it belongs. But, I guess you wouldn't know that since your wheelhouse seems to be ancient web pages and dinky phone games.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a mobile game developer the biggest reason is Apple's support. We have a time exclusive agreement with Apple (they get the first 2 weeks of any new feature release to themselves) for their support marketing and app store placement. Apple also provides a lot of engineering and technical support for the titles as well. IOS users are more likely to monetize as well. For us, iOS users monetize better.

Development costs though Android is a lot cheaper due to iteration time. We can iterate fast and push out updates instantly on Android. Apple has a 2 week approval turn around time, and if they don't approve it can mean a month+ of lag time. That is even with our relationship with Apple and having a direct contact. We develop new games on Android first, going to test market, making sure to hide the tests from Apple, then do the first release submission to Apple(They get pissy if we "released" on android first even though it was just a test.) If Apple had a day turn around time or quicker for updates to approved apps then our iOS costs would be cheaper. We get around most of this by having game data server side but sometimes you still have to push out client updates regularly.

From a technical perspective Androids are a really mixed bag of devices. We can't just go off of the OS version number. We have to query the graphics device for its model number and make a lot of specific use cases. Certain graphics devices don't fully support everything they advertise while Apple ensures it is a lot more homogeneous. From a QA perspective we only need four or five iOS devices to ensure we meet min spec and recommended spec performances. Mobile carriers on Android are a problem too, I'm looking at you T-Mobile when you don't update Android for even last year's phones. We have to work around a few bugs that are present in old versions. With Android its worse - a huger test matrix of OS version and hardware to cover.

Also, Android audio really sucks and still has huge delays. Games just don't have the same pop & response feeling as iOS due to Android's audio delay. http://www.androidauthority.com/horrendous-android-audio-latency-624171/

For us it comes down to our excellent history and relationship with Apple. They pretty much guarantee one of our new games gets placed top 10 on the app store for 24 hours when it launches assuming it meets everyone's expectations.

Re:Why?

[Dixie_Flatline]

So as a programmer in the AAA games industry, one of the nicest things about supporting consoles is that they're a fixed target and your development only gets more efficient over time. The API changes almost not at all, your engine settles into place, and your optimization pipeline becomes more refined as time goes on. You make better games at the end of the cycle than at the beginning.

Don't discount the value of a development target that is very consistent. After the first time we build some engine components, we literally never have to update them ever again. This is a big part of why consoles really took off and PC games comparatively languished for so long--each PC configuration represents a potential problem we didn't cover around the edges, and THOSE people are the ones that any support costs are going in to. If one person on console finds a bug and we can fix it, we've covered every single console user simultaneously. In the PC world, we've only fixed the problem for a handful of people and we're waiting for the next edge case.

I've never worked with Android, so I take you at your word that it's easier than it would seem for someone on the outside looking in, but I don't think it's entirely fair to accost the parent post.

Re:Why?

[gyroheli]

Are you referring to making a C/C++ call from Java? Cause that is a whole lot different and a lot easier to make than a Java call from C/C++. JNI is ugly, just because "that's the way it is" doesn't make it not ugly nor should that be the reason Google's actions should be tolerated. You make it sound like it isn't possible to have more than one language for an OS. Windows and pretty much every other platform that supports Java easily supports C/C++ and Java without one limiting the other. It isn't excusable just because they decided to focus on Java. I mean really the NDK is only there iirc because developers were complaining about how slow their applications were (games primarily i think). Everything since then has been a half assed job to support the bare minimum.

Also here's some sample code, if you don't think that's ugly i don't know what to tell you. I also didn't go into the problems with debugging either but at least some of it was fixed i think. Like how startup code use to not be debug-able cause the debugger for native code was started after the application was already running.
jstring Java_the_package_MainActivity_getJniString( JNIEnv* env, jobject obj){

jstring jstr = (*env)->NewStringUTF(env, "This comes from jni.");
jclass clazz = (*env)->FindClass(env, "com/inceptix/android/t3d/MainActivity");
jmethodID messageMe = (*env)->GetMethodID(env, clazz, "messageMe", "(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/String;");
jobject result = (*env)->CallObjectMethod(env, obj, messageMe, jstr);

const char* str = (*env)->GetStringUTFChars(env,(jstring) result, NULL);
printf("%s\n", str);

return (*env)->NewStringUTF(env, str);
}

Re:Why?

[exomondo]

I think you took his second point the wrong way, feature wise you can support Kitkat for android and that'll cover ~70% of users or something like that.

Except that there is an enormous range of hardware. For every iPhone hardware revision there are thousands of Android device hardware revisions, thinking that you can just code for an OS when you have a huge amount of hardware variation is very naive. The difficulty is in making sure the game runs decently on a vast range of hardware. It's easy to test on all supported hardware configurations for the latest iOS release but how do you do that for Android KitKat for example?

Re:Why?

[exomondo]

Yeah yeah, change the record. If you think this is a big issue then you have never programmed for Windows / web / any operating system that isn't the very brief device-limited situation that iOS is lucky enough to be in.

Rubbish! This is the very reason PC games have vast arrays of settings to be able to tune performance from AA, AF, texture resolution, screen resolution, reflection visibility and resolution, physics complexity, HDR, bloom, etc, etc, while consoles don't. PCs have a vast array of potential hardware and capabilities compared to the static hardware of consoles.

Re:Why?

[west]

Have you tried reporting the pirate links...

You can play an infinite game of whack-a-mole with these sites.

My wife's an author, and while she had the good grace to just ignore it, I was irritated enough to write polite letters to the first half-dozen sites when pirate book sites started to appear. One actually wrote an apology and took it down. Another replied in broken English to indicate what would happen if I tried to further interfere with his revenue stream (most pirate sites generate revenue in the form of ads). When another half-dozen new sites popped up in the next week, I realized my wife was right.

All you can do is hope that not *too* many young adults have adopted the motto "Only stupid people pay when they don't have to."

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Choice of hardware is a great thing. Apple doesn't give you many options. And it's proprietary. It sucks.

When people go to sell a video game they want to sell as many copies as they can, for the money. Monetary incentive. If every phone you bought came with on it, you would still have many hardware options. With Android you can modify your OS or even install a different custom OS. You can do it on many hardware configurations. With Apple phones? Nope.

So the type of people who are knowingly/unknowingly buying iPhones are also knowingly/unknowingly limiting themselves to: Apple's walled garden. These same type of people are more likely to buy some custom Tetris or Bubble blaster whatever that is sold on their walled garden device.

Android hardware is very fast compared to iPhone hardware. If the same games were good and compiled for Android, they would likely run even better than they do on iPhone. The walled garden ecosystem is there for those who like it.

You can actually have both. It's a relatively speaking expensive adventure to buy an iPhone for "Alto's Adventure" or whatever else games.

If phones were like retail PC's and all retail phones came with iOS on them you would be like fuck, this is weak. So it goes with Microsoft Windows. That's why Android and Linux are well liked.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

If every phone you bought came with on it,

Oops. I used wrong operand. less-than/greater-than woops. Should say..

If every phone you bought came with [name the OS], you would still have many hardware options.

braces instead. yee

Re:Why?

[fluffernutter]

The difference is, at my wealth demographi l, I didn't go to school with kids who wore 'name brand' stuff. In fact clothes were rarely discussed at all. Now my kids are at the same level of wealth that I am perhaps a little less wealthy, and all their friends have phones and judging by how they imessage each other, they are mostly ios.

it's imessage that is the thing. Not sure why imessage is so popular over Skype, sms, or any of the other messaging apps that come out weekly but that is how all the kids communicate where I am. So with that population of kids comes profit for games.

Re:Why?

[__aanbvm4272]

Homo Gene Ous you meant...

Re: Why?

[tlhIngan]

You know, if you reframed your discussion in the context of Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8 a few years ago, you'd be in the same boat. Yet oddly there were tons of Windows games being released every year and Mac OS X gaming lagged behind (if games were released for it at all). Clearly in both cases, you could just target the oldest version (Jelly Bean/XP) and cover 90+% of users. So that's obviously not the issue. What would likely be the issue is instead that Android games are generally expected to be cheap and often are paid exclusively on ad support. That alone limits what sort of games are likely to be on the platform. Versioning is very much a moot point.

And that's the issue - the business model for apps on iOS is you charge for them up front and that's it, with maybe a few in-app purchases (In fact, the app store has a "Pay once, play forever" section for games that have no in-app purchases).

On Android, most users don't pay for apps. This can be attributed partly to Android history (Google Wallet only supported a few countries, so paid apps were hidden in countries that didn't support it), but also sideloading was considering a "popular" reason to go Android. Couple this with app encryption being only enabled recently, so pirating apps was extremely easy.

And all this despite Android making it harder to get at the APK files - on iOS, you can back up your apps using iTunes and keep access to the IPA files.

Oh, and there's tons of games being released every year for Windows that isn't coming to OS X. But even the PC side is suffering - consoles have lower piracy rates and the PC side is often rewarded with "ports" of game unless there's online DRM checking. Lots of PC games are more "indie" style games where profits and costs are lower - the AAA games are typically console first or console primary.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

if i was getting such levels of piracy on my app, i'd just give up on that platform.

So basically, you could make loads of money, but because freeloaders exist, you'd forego all that?

Re:Why?

[interval1066]

Oh please, show me a language that doesn't have what you call "ugliness" in it. Having to use unicode strings in your app because it'll run on windows (why microsoft couldn't use the saner utf8 character set is beyond me) but, yes, "that's the way it is". Not sure how that's an indication of "ugliness". You want something to work, do it right, or create your own mechanism. You're completely free to take the android platform and create your own programming environment using what ever language you want if you find jni so ugly. However, if you find that you need to create a union between your language of choice and another one, lets see how you handle it. As I said, java is not my go to language. But that's how i write my android apps. And if I want to access a c/c++ library for some reason, a jni object to get to it is just not a big deal to me. It is to you, not to me. So what.

Re: Why?

[greenfruitsalad]

i don't think you can make any money at those piracy levels. they way he described it was they ended up with loads of unfavourable reviews from people who didn't purchase the software and didn't use the latest version. people who were using buggy, malware ridden old versions were the loudest to complain.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Choice of hardware is a great thing.

It can be a good thing but in reality how many people do you really think know whether their phone has a Qualcomm, Samsung or Mediatek SoC? Or how many cores it has or what sort of GPU it has? How would it benefit users to know this? This isnt helpful at all, it just makes the platform more difficult to develop for. It has also left many hardware configurations completely unsupported by newer versions of the operating system and since they are on unsupported versions they don't get security fixes and are vulnerable to the many many Android exploits.

Apple doesn't give you many options.

Well they do have quite a few but the fewer you have the easier it is to develop for and the less time developers have to spend worrying about various other configurations so the software quality is better.

And it's proprietary.

As is almost all hardware sold that runs Android as well as pretty much all the important bits of Android (Play Services, drivers, etc).

With Android you can modify your OS or even install a different custom OS. You can do it on many hardware configurations.

This is disingenuous, that "different custom OS" needs to be based on the Android underpinnings otherwise your drivers won't work. Most also have locked bootloaders and modifying the OS, recompiling with the proprietary drivers working correctly is in most cases prohibitively difficult. This is why there are so many vulnerable phones stuck on old OS versions that cannot be upgraded.

So the type of people who are knowingly/unknowingly buying iPhones are also knowingly/unknowingly limiting themselves to: Apple's walled garden.

And by and large the people buying Android phones are limiting themselves to the version of the OS that it shipped with and no security fixes.

But I'll bite, with Android being free of restriction what is the fantastic, must-have innovation that this freedom has provided that iOS users cannot get? For all the hum drum about freedom being essential it hasn't exactly provided anything great to users.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It can be a good thing but in reality how many people do you really think know whether their phone has a Qualcomm, Samsung or Mediatek SoC? Or how many cores it has or what sort of GPU it has? How would it benefit users to know this? This isnt helpful at all, it just makes the platform more difficult to develop for. It has also left many hardware configurations completely unsupported by newer versions of the operating system and since they are on unsupported versions they don't get security fixes and are vulnerable to the many many Android exploits.

Actually people I know do know what chips are in their phones. Capabilities, features, and protocols are not mysterious. People do look at them. And what happens is other people that also do know what chips are in their phones... like tech sites... anandtech... toms hardware... xda-developers etc... review and compare... and there are also sites like

compare phones
http://www.phonearena.com/phones and http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3
hardware comparisons for PC components blahblah
ssdboss.com cpuboss.com gpuboss.com

You can Google and compare easily too.
https://encrypted.google.com/#q=samsung+s6+vs+lg+g5

etc. People do research before they purchase phones as well as PC's. I would never recommend people to do stupid shit. If somebody were to say "hey man, I don't look at chip model numbers on my phones". I would tell them something like well others do and here's where to look at their comparisons. I wouldn't say "oh, well yeah that makes sense. just cross your fingers and hope it's better because it's sold as fancy".

Well they do have quite a few but the fewer you have the easier it is to develop for and the less time developers have to spend worrying about various other configurations so the software quality is better.

Apple phones are just apple phones. To find out how much RAM for eg. they hide in their phones you have to xray it.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/26/9401563/iphone-6s-teardown-ram-confirmed-2gb

They hide it because it is not a sell point. Android phones have faster hardware. Apple, across all devices, is profit motivated. The allure of "my phone is fancy" only applies to people who are trying to "look fancy with a phone in their hand". Android OS is better. Android is Linux. Android is not a walled garden. Android you can wipe your device and put other OS's. Custom ROM's. Every single thing about the top Android phones are better than every single thing about the top Apple phones.

As is almost all hardware sold that runs Android as well as pretty much all the important bits of Android (Play Services, drivers, etc).

Proprietary but from a vast array of companies. With Android you can choose LG, Samsung, HTC, etc. With Apple.. you buy Apple's "i'm fancy now" made by "open it and xray it bitches".

This is disingenuous, that "different custom OS" needs to be based on the Android underpinnings otherwise your drivers won't work. Most also have locked bootloaders and modifying the OS, recompiling with the proprietary drivers working correctly is in most cases prohibitively difficult. This is why there are so many vulnerable phones stuck on old OS versions that cannot be upgraded.

What you said is a lie. What I said is 100% straight. There is no long story about underpinnings. There are ways to modify Android phones. Look in xda-developers forums, Android Central forums, etc.

https://encrypted.google.com/#q=android+forums

Custom ROM's are available for Android. Not news. Custom ROM's are "the joke of hipsters in gay bars" if you have an Apple. You can use older custom ROM's on older Android phones. You can use older and newer custom ROM's on newer Android phones. Compatibility issues are similar to those of computers. How could this be? Smart phones are computers with extra radios, devices, protocols, etc. Th

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I eat my luckily still warm sandwich, come to click refresh on the front page. This is top of front page right now.
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/15/11/12/227225/apple-apparently-planning-mobile-peer-to-peer-payment-service

Even the story links to a paywalled wsj article.

The company is said to be in talks with major banks including JP Morgan and Wells Fargo to develop a new framework

There ya go. Fortunately I don't give half a shit about Apple's lies, xray'd hardware, walled garden, or transferring funds to some fag's Apple watch courtesy of JP Morgan.

Re:Why?

[gyroheli]

Using unicode isn't the problem, which tells me you probably don't understand why that code is ugly. Microsoft does allow utf8 character for windows, you can choose between the two.

I wouldn't need to create a union, cause i would simply program in C++. Even in Android's situation, Google could easily make some sort of C++ library for Android where they do all the JNI calls themselves. That way the user would never have to use JNI themselves. Even from there, odds are the Java code for the Android library makes some call to native. At that point it's simply exposing that API in native code. Like i said Android is just half assing native support. So no that's not the way it is, cause there are so many ways it could be fixed to the point you wouldn't even need to make a JNI call to Java from C++ or vice versa. You could just do everything in C++ which, if you are using C++ for a game you would probably actually prefer. Though that's NOT possible because of Google's laziness to implement an actual native API. So there is another way, you could avoid JNI altogether and then there's not of this bs that "that's the way it is" cause that's not the way is. That's the current way it is but there is a better way that Google just refuses to do. Probably cause they want you to write in Java, so that it is easier to disassemble your code to spy on, who knows.

Like i said in the previous post, calling a C/C++ from Java isn't that difficult, why you keep saying it isn't that big of a deal i don't understand without even acknowledging the way i'm actually talking about. It's making a Java call from C/C++ that is a pain in the ass. You know if you are writing in C/C++ and you need to make some call to Java code to get information you need. No using Unicode isn't the problem, nor is it the fact that you have to manually create a Java object in C++ code.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2... - whatever

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

My argument boils down to "Programming is difficult". A

.. and that the order of difficulty doesn't matter. In your argument.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

or 5/ is apple paying developers not to release products for Android? (hint: they were caught paying the developers of plants vs. zombies not to release a version for android)

Nope, they were caught giving them "premium placement on their app stores' home pages and features lists.". And Google was caught doing the same. http://kotaku.com/report-apple...

Hardware

[bickerdyke]

Espescially with games, it's where the bigger hardware variety turns around and bites Android in the back.

It's testing on 4 or 5 models vs testing a game on 300 phones.

Add the fact that iOS users are more willing to pay for Apps (they signed up with their credit card already so those 88ct are 88ct only and not 88ct plus signing up with your credit card at a vendor with questionable reputation of making profits with data)

Been there, done that...

[Anonymous Coward]

> With Respect To Gaming, Android Still Lags Behind iOS

"With Respect To Gaming, CP/M Still Lags Behind Apple DOS 3.3"

Everything is repetition... *sigh*

Re:Been there, done that...

[CronoCloud]

This is scored "0"? It's actually insightful. CP/M wasn't considered a suitable game platform in the early days of PC gaming because there were a plethora of different CP/M machines with different keyboards, screen resolutions, CPUs, RAM...even different disk drive formats. CP/M wasn't just one platform...it was actually several.

The Commodore 128 was probably the CP/M machine with the most compatiblity with others, that being due to the the 1571 being able to read and write other CP/M disk formats.

Re: Been there, done that...

[Anonymous Coward]

The C128 came so late in the history of CP/M that it can be considered a graveyard scavenger. At that point it was simply a haven for people refusing to update to MS-DOS.

Gaming on a phone is painful

[areusche]

Gaming on a phone is a painful experience unless the phone is physically designed for it like the Nokia N-Gage (talk about a throwback). After playing Angry Birds and Temple Run it's a miracle I haven't smashed my phone more often.

Re:Gaming on a phone is painful

[TwentyCharsIsNotEnou]

I agree with you, but most of the world doesn't - which is what really matters if you want to sell games.

Re:Gaming on a phone is painful

[Z80a]

Most games live off a very small minority of people that drops a *LOT* of cash in games due some sort of compulsion, the so called "whales", while the rest just use the free features.
So its not exactly "the world" here.

And probably the whales also tend to buy more expensive, luxury devices like the Apple ones, which would explain the disparity.

Re:Gaming on a phone is painful

[Anonymous Coward]

Reality-check: the "world" is playing games on their phone and doing fine without bitching about how it doesn't suit games because isn't an N-Gage.

The "world" is also playing more contemporary stuff than Angry Birds and Temple Run.

Who ends up paying for games has no bearing on how many tens of millions of people are happily playing them, on their phone, every day.

But let's not pretend OP isn't a troll. That N-Gage line kind of gives it away, don't you think? Plus the fact he hasn't even tried a new game in three years.

Re:Gaming on a phone is painful

[Anonymous Coward]

Angry Birds? Temple Run? The N-Gage?

Obvious troll is obvious. Try updating this chestnut with some games from the last three years and a spectacularly failed platform from the last ten, then it'll be more subtle.

Re:Gaming on a phone is painful

[Anonymous Coward]

The world is playing match-3 games on their phones and that's about it.

Re:Gaming on a phone is painful

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the "world" wants slot machine games (which are pretty easy to program), where people pay a lot of real-life currency so they can keep playing.

After Apple's IAP mechanism went into place, the entire face of app gaming changed from giving a product that was worth the cash... to a basic shell with a high difficulty ramp-up just to coax the user into buying that sack of brains/smurfberries/units/crowns. Candy Crush, anyone?

Which is what we have now. I know people who sink thousands of dollars a month into Clash of Clans and other "MMO"s just so they can have the most epic armor, because the guy right by them is going to out-epic them... a virtual keeping with the Joneses that makes the app companies rich... but ensure that the gaming ecosystem on iOS, Android, and other platforms is a worthless wasteland.

Re: Gaming on a phone is painful

[Bing Tsher E]

Ah, the Whales!

It's interesting to tour the towns of the "top leader board" players of games like Township and Hay Day. What empty lives they must lead, when that's the best they can accomplish with daddy's credit card. You get the feeling they're lonely rich kids trapped in a highrise in Singapore, or Saudi Princesses.

Township is even out for Windows Phone now, btw.

Re: Gaming on a phone is painful

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting to tour the towns of the "top leader board" players of games like Township and Hay Day. What empty lives they must lead, when that's the best they can accomplish with daddy's credit card. You get the feeling they're lonely rich kids trapped in a highrise in Singapore, or Saudi Princesses.

If that's how you have to envisage it to make your clumsy, ham-fisted self feel better then yes, ok.

Re:Gaming on a phone is painful

[exomondo]

Gaming on a phone is a painful experience unless the phone is physically designed for it like the Nokia N-Gage (talk about a throwback).

The fact that hundreds of millions of people worldwide don't consider it a painful experience and your hero device was a spectacular failure that nobody wanted would suggest you're more than a little out of touch.

It's not about Android or IOS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Developers don't take an Apple first approach,

they take a "money first" approach.

Re:It's not about Android or IOS.

[jabuzz]

Interesting, because the mobile game I play "Castle Clash" which is available for just about every platform under the sun lags behind on iOS compared to Android, by a considerable amount. It can be weeks before updates to the game make it to iOS. On the other hand Amazon which has a smaller user base than iOS gets the updates much faster, usually only a day or two behind Google Play, and sometimes even in advance.

Could it be that the developers just develop on whatever platform they are comfortable with, whether that be iOS or Android and might simply not have the wherewithal to develop for the alternative platform.

Re:It's not about Android or IOS.

[PixetaledPikachu]

Interesting, because the mobile game I play "Castle Clash" which is available for just about every platform under the sun lags behind on iOS compared to Android, by a considerable amount. It can be weeks before updates to the game make it to iOS. On the other hand Amazon which has a smaller user base than iOS gets the updates much faster, usually only a day or two behind Google Play, and sometimes even in advance

Castle Clash and its' ilk are ad supported and freemium no? The likes of them tend to go with platforms that provide more eyes, in this case android (and to certain extent, Fire OS)

Re:It's not about Android or IOS.

[jabuzz]

You can do TapJoy on the Google Play, but you would have to spend a *LOT* of time to accumulate even a moderate amount of in game currency. So much that it is not worth the effort unless you are really poor and have insane amounts of free time on your hands.

Therefore you mostly fork out real $$$ for the in game currency. Though you can do a lot completely free to play as well (as I do, not spent a penny).

Re:It's not about Android or IOS.

[Dog-Cow]

It also just plain takes longer to get through the App Store submission process. On Google Play, you can release a new version every hour, if you want.

Re:It's not about Android or IOS.

[pastafazou]

That's because software developers can release updates to google apps without them going through the approval process again. Apple screens and tests all updates to ensure they're safe, and it can take several weeks for updates to finally appear in the Apple Store.

Re:It's not about Android or IOS.

[Anonymous Coward]

It also just plain takes longer to get through the App Store submission process. On Google Play, you can release a new version every hour, if you want.

Ahh, so Google bans all apps after they have been available for some time?

Devs target platfom where people may actually pay

[Anonymous Coward]

More news at 11.

FIFY

[Anonymous Coward]

Android lags in everything. Always has. Always will. Ahhmmmm.

I dont play games on my phone

[Anonymous Coward]

And now what?

How bad is piracy on Android?

[wisebabo]

I live in Vietnam so everything here is pirated already. How bad is it in the U.S. (and other "developed") countries? Are most apps available (illegally) for free?

Maybe even if they are "pirated" they can still earn revenue for their developers if they earn money through ads. Or have the pirated versions been modified to remove/change the ads?

Re:How bad is piracy on Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about the U.S., but in Europe paid Android apps are simply not that popular. It seems that most people neither buy, nor pirate them on any significant scale. There are plenty of free apps that do almost everything you would want.

Re:How bad is piracy on Android?

[iampiti]

I live in Europe and I don't pirate software anymore but most people I know don't pay for apps (I've bought some). I guess we're just not used to it.
Also, I think the fact that Android doesn't limit you to apps from the official app store makes pirating easier. I bought some apps legally (e.g.: through humble bundle) which are delivered as simple apk's. You don't need to be root to install whatever apk you come across.

Re:How bad is piracy on Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a game developer and piracy takes a huge hit of Android sales. I make a fraction on Google Play of what I do on the iTunes store. As soon as I upload an new update for my game, it end up on the Android pirates sites in hours. Honestly, it's not even worth doing an Android version these days.

Re:How bad is piracy on Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the U.S. I don't pirate executables for the simple reason they could be malware. Music and movies are fair game. Games that run under emulators are also okay since there's less risk it'll affect the system.

I don't even bother gaming on Android, though. Why bother? I've got a desktop computer. DOS and SNES games from 20 years ago are better than almost any mobile game. And I've got some decent PC games via Steam (and games on an NDS emulator).

Apple products are designed to milk the customers

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really a surprise that the fraudulent design is working as intended? The schemers at Apple spent billions and hired tens of psychologists to get you to fork over as much as humanly possible.

Future of games?

[m.alessandrini]

I'm kinda out of the business in my 40s. Just as a curiosity, do you think gaming is stronger on consoles, mobile devices or still PC (Steam)?

Re:Future of games?

[Talderas]

As a function of revenue Mobile > Console > PC

Apple's 'no emulator' policy

[elal1862]

...may also be a contributing factor. I reckon that being able to install emulators, thus having thousands of pirated oldsk00l games on tap, does hurt the willingness to pay for games.

Re:Apple's 'no emulator' policy

[Anonymous Coward]

It also doesn't help that most of the Android games are the same basic rock-paper-scissors and aren't different and there's a crapload of them. With iOS, you have the perception (magic words there...) that there's profitability because there's actually LESS of them and you have less choices. The variability is a bit higher as a result, so...

Re:Apple's 'no emulator' policy

[Anonymous Coward]

As an example... Dungeon Keeper... LAME, to be blunt- it's nothing like the previous two titles and it's a hobbled up cripple of the franchise. While it's on iOS, this is endemic of the whole Android game scene. Few games worthy of being "gaming". Few studios willing to put the real work into a real game on mobile platforms. Not inXile, though. Square 1 and inXile produced The Bard's Tale. There's others. And then there's great games that were iOS only and flamed out. Ascendency, for example.

Sorry, not buying the bullshit TFA is shovelling here.

Re:Apple's 'no emulator' policy

[Anonymous Coward]

They do allow emulators, but games for it either need to be shipped with the emulator or available as official DLC packs through the App Store. They won't allow you to load any old game/ROM into them. I'm not sure if that's an anti-piracy thing or to stop a whole category of shell apps that have unchecked executable content loaded into them dynamically. Most likely the latter.

Re:Apple's 'no emulator' policy

[Shados]

::gasps:: are you implying piracy may hurt revenue streams?

Re:Apple's 'no emulator' policy

[Anonymous Coward]

You should also reckon that playing games designed for a controller sucks major donkey cock on a touch screen. It's absolutely terrible. Yes, hardware adaptors exist, but they aren't ubiquitous.

Meanwhile..

[Anonymous Coward]

Things that matter are often released first on Android. For example, iOS got StackExchange app only recently..

Re:Meanwhile..

[danbob999]

This is to be expected, as there are more Android users. There are more applications, especially free ones, in Google Play.

ios monitizes better

[Anonymous Coward]

same game (thanks to framework) on ios and android results in 80% of net profits coming from apple and only 20% from google.

strange bugs resulting from android version fragmentation drive down your rating and causes high support costs. not to mention that we have 5 ios test devices, and 40+ android test devices to check for those fragmentation bugs.

in short: developing for android is more work and results in less profit.

Then someone make a clone

[robmv]

Then someone make a clone for Android and you cry a river because people know about it and probably make the money your should have received. knowing nothing about your game on Android when you release it later. see 2048 history

It's a phone

[wkwilley2]

He's not wrong, iOS is definitely easier to code for due to the far lower number of devices compared to the user base.

Although, I use my phone as a phone. If I want to play a game, I go home and boot my PC up.

Re:It's a phone

[Moof123]

This. Touch interface sucks for many types of games. When stuck on a long flight I generally end up just playing solitare or 2048, after quickly tiring of the level of focus and frustration from trying to play most everything else. I gave up on data for my phone a few months back, since I so rarely needed it on the go. So I have a quad core bohemoth of a computer in my pocket for phone calls, a few texts, and taking pictures. Luckily I found a phone plan that costs me only $13.41 a month for what I actually need it for. I can quickly turn data back on if I ever need maps to work away from wifi, but haven't in the last 3 months.

Wouldn't Google pay for porting?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your app is great we pay you $$$ if you port it to Android". Why don't they do it? Or have they done it and it failed?

Frustration?

[JanneM]

No frustration. It's not as if Android is lacking in games after all. And IOS-only games are, well, only available on IOS. Since I have no iphone I never hear about them, and don't miss them.

Re:Frustration?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that. There are approximately 90 million games out there, all of which are variations on the same theme 1) solve a puzzle or 2) dodge the things that kill you and gather the grub.

Boring. Do I really care that iOS has more skins on these basic themes? Nope.

I'm not worried about the price of diesel either

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an iPhone, and when I go looking for games (or any app) I don't look at Google Play. I have a Mac, and I don't search for Windows software either. I never consider the options that are exclusive to another platform and therefore I don't get frustrated by the limitations.

Quit whining

[Anonymous Coward]

When Mac users complain about a lack of good games or the delay in getting games, they are told to STFU. Android users: STFU.

Interesting point, but meaningless to most

[johnlcallaway]

When I run out of games to play on my Samsung, I still won't consider Apple because I think their interface and control-freak issues mostly suck the big one. My company forced me to have one for awhile, so I had two phones. I just recently gave it back because a 'free' phone is worth exactly that; I'd rather pay for my Android than use a free iPhone.

Fortunately, I'm not one of those people who just have to have the latest game or phone so I can be part of the 'in' crowd. I'm happy waiting until my old phone breaks before getting a new one and playing the few games I have for the few minutes a day I play them because I'm not addicted to my fucking phone.

Android and iOS don't have LUDDIITE games!

[Anonymous Coward]

They have APPS! Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps!

Apps!

Point-and-click adventures

[tepples]

You could always make/play point-and-click games instead of trying to shoehorn directional-control mechanics onto a positional platform. Point-and-click worked for ICOM (MacVenture series), Activision (Return to Zork), Cyan (Myst), Sierra (King's Quest; Leisure Suit Larry), LucasArts (old Monkey Island), and Telltale (modern Monkey Island). Shoot-em-ups such as AirAttack HD also tend to work well, with the touch screen acting like a laptop's trackpad to move the player's vehicle.

Ideally, gamers would be able to buy a MOGA gamepad and clip it onto a phone. But last time I checked these gamepad manufacturers weren't releasing sales figures to let game studios determine the size of the market for phones with buttons.

Tetris successfully sued a cloner

[tepples]

Then perhaps you need to get more aggressive at suing cloners like Tetris is.

Re:I'm not worried about the price of diesel eithe

[tepples]

I have an iPhone, and when I go looking for games (or any app) I don't look at Google Play. I have a Mac, and I don't search for Windows software either.

Yet Windows and Android software keeps popping up in search results when you use a generic web search engine, such as DuckDuckGo or Bing, to search for reviews of apps in a particular category.

profit

[Torvac]

ios has nothing over android. you develop your ios game for profits and you will make 70-90% there, the android version is for reputation only. this is the normal non-candycrush/clashofclans scenario.

iOS revenues are ~5X Android for us

[engineerErrant]

I am part owner of an established startup doing mobile games aimed at kids. The decision to support Android was always a contentious one for us, and after years of beating our heads against that wall, I wish we had never done it.

I won't get into value judgments or rhetoric about openness - the revenue on Android just isn't even faintly close to iOS. Maybe 20 cents on the dollar on a *good* day. But as you might guess, it's taken up a lot more than 20% of our time. This fact is sometimes presented with undertones that iOS developers are just greedy, but it's literally a matter of survival - for us, Android simply cannot sustain a viable business.

As far as ease of development: the other comments capture it pretty well; both platforms have a lot of annoyances that you have to work around. Compared to my background developing server applications on Linux, I find both platforms shamefully bug-ridden and slapped together, but I wouldn't say that one is noticeably worse in the big picture.

Apple is harder to work with

[Anonymous Coward]

I own a mobile development studio with 15 employees. We use Unity for everything, which takes away the technical unknowns. The only obstacles are with the deployment mechanisms.

Our products get released on Android first sometimes months in advance of iOS, because working within Apple's provisioning, testing, and deployment architecture is a massive pain in the ass. It takes 10 minutes to deploy a Google Play update. It takes sometimes weeks for the same thing on iOS... And God help you if you introduced a critical bug.

Mobile gaming sucks

[iamacat]

Due to unfortunate Apple's decision to set price minimum to $0.99, both app stores are flooded with dumb repetitive gameplay not worth paying for. They should have set base price at $9.99. Then, if someone manages to sell 100 copies of an interesting hobby game, they can buy themselves a new iPad and get motivated to do more.

Now it could well be that iOS has more copies of Candy Crush than Android, but I am not missing them in any way. What I wish is that Steam had an Android client with cross-platform play for desktop games with mobile ports, like Talos Principle and Fran Bow. Then each game would be worth more than desktop or mobile port alone, as I wouldn't have to give up big screen or conversely wait until I am home to play.

I endorse some excuses to infringe, just not those

[tepples]

I personally refuse to endorse the litany of infringement excuses commonly repeated on Slashdot by "information wants to be free" types. But one I will endorse is when the copyright owner either A. cannot be located and contacted or B. refuses to offer a license at a royalty close to the royalty for comparable uses of comparable works. The law at least ought to make statutory damages unavailable in those cases, allowing a reuser to put a reasonable royalty into a trust with which to settle with the copyright owner for actual damages later.

Example of A: mccalli's situation and other situations listed in Orphan works
Example of B: Song of the South, where comparable works include the same studio's Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Another example of B: The detailed rules of Tetris or any other video game whose publisher wants to promote it as an e-sport, where comparable works include the rules of tennis

Um, facts please?

[Anonymous Coward]

While the write makes the claim that "many developers start on iOS" and then points out *one* app that was built for iOS and not Android, I'm not seeing any sort of real numbers here. How many mobile apps are developed per year? How many start on iOS, Android or both? How many apps exist for iOS and not Android and vice versa?

Frankly, this seems like an Apple fanboy post given the complete lack of relevant facts.

Just a quick web search turns on a page at statista.com which indicates that Google Play has 1.6M apps and Apple Store has 1.5M, which would seem to completely refute the author's claim that people are starting on iOS and never going to Android. But that's just, you know, a *fact* - lets not let facts confuse us when our minds are already made up...

BGRNews is never anything but click bait

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't fall for it.

Are you sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Android devices account for a majority of the installed-base of phones and tablets, have widely supported controllers for quite a while (some of them ARE controllers, look at Nvidia Shield Portable), have a more open marketplace where a lot more emulators and ports are welcome, have cheaper (or free) developer's kits, accept larger batteries and SD cards for when space or battery life are strained... Can you connect your iPod to a controller you already own from PS3, XBox or PC? Can you write new iOS programs ON the device, or on Linux? Can you replace the battery of an iOS machine so you can game on it longer? Can you connect an SD card to an iOS machine when you want more room for new games? How many games can you only play on iOS with a hacked device due to exclusion from the Apple App Store? I think someone should check the score here.

Try being a Windows Phone gamer

[Anonymous Coward]

...stop laughing

Try being a Windows Phone gamer

[Halomez]

...stop laughing.

Well what else are you going to do with iOS?

[GodelEscherBlecch]

Non-facetiously, I do think it also has to do with many of the technical / app store factors already listed here.

But,

It takes all of 5 minutes to run through every possible customization option in iOS, which leaves you turning to games that much quicker in your eternal quest to find more ways to stare at your phone. On Android you have a solid week ahead of you of trying out every possible flavor of the settings and apps that customize your phone. And that's just on the 'legit' app store.

Not denigrating either experience, this is just based on my experience switching between the two. I always found gaming on phones to be a frustrating waste of time. Never once considered putting anything but crosswords on my Android. But with iOS it gets stale so much faster that I ended up buying a number of games just because there isn't really any fun dinking around with the phone itself to be had.

The opposite of the PC market

[Anonymous Coward]

For years I owned Macintosh computers. But it always frustrated me that there were 20 games available on the Windows PC for every game I could buy for the Mac. I finally bit the bullet and purchased a Windows machine.

From my perspective Apple shot itself in the foot by not supporting gaming more.

So it's interesting to see this turnaround on mobile devices.

There's nothing wrong with Android

[tanstaaf1]

That taking Google out of the equation couldn't fix!

why do you need to leave?

[Anonymous Coward]

why not just buy an ipad or ipad mini to game on and use whatever you want for your phone? it's not like you have to own only one device.