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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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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)