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?

[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]

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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: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.

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?

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.