Android vs. iphone

[vshah]

i've probably spent at least 150 on android apps in 2.5 years

 

[purbeast0]

better and easier development tools (from what I read) and more money in iOS (Apple users tend to buy more apps)

as a mobile developer, this is definitely true.

It's a lot cheaper to develop for ios than android due to easier testing and less hardware to optimize for. Every generation of apple stuff is the same CPU and gpu.

100% incorrect.

it costs MORE to develop for iOS. it costs $100/yr whereas Android only costs a one time flat fee of $25 and that's only IF you want to put it on their market. you don't have to pay that price if you want to sell it yourself an alternative way.

and you can simply use the emulators to test out different hardware for Android. you don't need any hardware to develop for either iOS or Android.

 

[alent1234]

A lot of developers have said that the reason they release for ios first is that on android you have to test at least a dozen devices or more. The emulator doesn't account for every hardware combination out there and will miss a lot of problems

 

[vshah]

The emulator doesn't account for every hardware combination out there and will miss a lot of problems

i've never really experienced this myself.

i test for the major screen resolutions for layout, and the major android releases. I also test with and without keyboards...never had compatibility issues.

i've never seen different phones respond differently to core app functionality (same code does diff things). Really one just needs to make sure that layout works on different res/screen sizes.

 

[alent1234]

Skype had issues with tegra2 phones for months. For simple apps the emulator is ok, but for anything that will test the hardware you need to test on a lot of devices

And a lot of the dev blogs will say that the testing part is where all their costs are

 

[MrX8503]

Android isn't really lacking quantity, but compared to iOS, the quality isn't very good. There's a multitude of reasons why iOS apps are better, but I would say one of them would be that the documentation for iOS SDK is way better than Android.

 

[BenSkywalker]

If you started right now, and spent one minute per app, eight hours a day, it would take you about two years to check out every app on the Android market. For the record, the Android app market has grown by an order of magnitude over the last two years(so, by the time you finished your minute an app two year haul, you may be looking at twenty more years...).

When looking at marketshare versus amount of available apps, apps aren't created overnight, and Android's rocket like marketshare is going to be quite a bit ahead of the development curve for a bit yet at least.

 

[Lotheron]

Somehow, I think this cartoon is quite fitting for the above discussion:

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps

 

[Oyeve]

I only spent $$$ on 2 of the 100s of apps. Poweramp and Splashtop.