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Android is for startups

blog.audobox.com

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Re: Android is for startups

#71

Post by tomasien »

It's perfectly fine to argue the merits of Android development, but arguing that it's hard to run an app on your own device using XCode is dishonest. It handles provisioning profiles automatically, and you can even hit "fix it" if it doesn't find a valid one when you try to run it.

I've been building an app for Android for 2 weeks now, and I still can't get the phone settings on an Android phone to use it for development. This may be MY problem because I'm a terrible developer, but it's still a problem.

Re: Android is for startups

#73

Post by opendomain »

opendomain wrote: post #15
avolcano wrote: post #5

> But if you build an app on Android that’s on par with the design quality you’re used to on iOS, your users will love you. The press will love you. Gizmodo will feature your app just so they’ll have a nice header image for their “Android Apps of the Week” post. That's nice, but will it translate into sales? Probably not, given the horror stories of Android piracy that seem to come out every few weeks (particularly i…

Android Apss are easier to deploy, but becuase of that, you get bad code - or WORSE - viruses! There are several Andoid apps that are Malware - there is not one in Apple App store.

Wow! Bad karma for dissing Android! For the record - my family has every platform, including Andorid phone, kindle, and set top boxes. I personally had 2 malwares installed on my Galaxy that bricked it. Also there are way too many apps on Android that ask for information access they should not have - like my GPS location or contacts info for a game. Andoid needs a little higher bar to remove this crapware.

Re: Android is for startups

#74

Post by 9999 »

The iOS development cycle works the way it does to protect Apple's customers. The people that pay for your application deserve and demand a certain level of quality. They also shouldn't be constantly bothered with updating your hastily developed, poorly tested, 'rapidly iterating' product.

As for Android, Google doesn't care. The person with the Android phone is not their customer, they're the product. Google is in the business of delivering users to advertisers. They are just barely in the business of making devices, and that's really just to feed more users to their advertisers by making a product that's as good as the iPhone and also to hedge against a single Android phone manufacturer from owning too much of the total Android market.

Re: Android is for startups

#75

Post by ajross »

Steko wrote: post #69
ajross wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another post that seems to have missed the point of the linked article. The last graph I saw estimated total revenue from iOS apps was about 2x that of total Play Store revenue (though to be fair, this undercounts Android a little as you can monetize apps via Amazon et. al. too). And of course Android is growing much faster. The contention in the linked article is that by pushing your "startup" app (which the…

The last graph I saw estimated total revenue from iOS apps was about 2x that of total Play Store revenue If Google had sent that much to developers they'd be saying something. 90% of the data points we see are of the form: My app made X on Android and 5-10X on iOS

I had to dig up a cite. This isn't the article that I remember looking at, but it's probably reporting the same number (specifically that iOS revenue is 2.3x that of Android): http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/31/android-in-app-downloads/

The reason those "data points" are skewed is psychology. No one is inspired to write a vitriolic blog post whining that their Android app only makes 73% as much as the iOS version. Nor is the iOS-centric HN echo chamber well equipped to give you a random sample of these things. And, frankly, lots of those bigger numbers are simply old. Android's market share is growing rapidly. Three years ago, I think 10x was probably correct.

Re: Android is for startups

#76

Post by prehkugler »

dlhavema wrote: post #65
x0054 wrote: post #49

I think the difference in development comes in when you need to do some hardware testing. With apple you need to design for 3 different display sizes, with 2 resolutions each. You also have to test your product on (at most) 12 different devices, and that's if you really want to cover the field. On the other hand, with Android, if you want to do it right, you need to design for hundreds of different screen sizes, all…

there was an article posted here a few weeks ago that talked about an android development company/group that boiled it down to ~10 major categories of devices that they needed to test with to get maximum device acceptance. So for them, unless a whole category of device comes out, like a smart watch for example, they do not need to have every device to test. and this encompassed screen sizes and OS versions.

> So for them, unless a whole category of device comes out, like a smart watch for example, they do not need to have every device to test.

Cue the Samsung Galaxy Gear.

Re: Android is for startups

#78

Post by jbjohns »

ensmotko wrote: post #31

Another thing that bothers me with development for iOS is that you need apple hardware and software. I can't develop an iOS on my Linux machine (I've tried running OSX in virtualbox, but it's slow and not to mention illegal). I really wish Apple would make their platform a little more available. Lowering the $100 yearly fee would be a good start...

If you can't even afford $100 a year you probably can afford anything you would need to develop for the platform (e.g. a mac).

Re: Android is for startups

#79

Post by prehkugler »

rjvir wrote: post #61

While the 5-10 day approval process to get the App Store is inconvenient for developers, it gets a disproportionate amount of attention. The limiting factor in software development is and will remain to be engineering resources. Building on the Apple ecosystem still takes considerably less time and effort to complete an app than Android, due to consistent and up-to-date hardware & software, common design patterns, a…

As a mobile developer who has worked on both platforms, I agree wholeheartedly with this. Xcode and Interface Builder is much easier to use than Eclipse (I found myself constantly editing the raw XML interface files). And I find the UIKit API much simpler to use (for most cases) than Android's Activity-based SDK.

Re: Android is for startups

#80

Post by anigbrowl »

Design is an easy win on Android, but it's the suck for any kind of audio processing because of the horrendous lag. Like MS before them, Google completely ignored the needs/requests of musicians for years on end, and as a result all the good apps are for iPad. The only two Android audio apps I can think of that are worth looking at are Caustic and FruityLoops, and neither is particularly performance-friendly. I was using a remote control MIDI app for a while called Humatic but the developer said device fragmentation was such a miserable experience that he never wants to develop on Android again.

I've been using Android since Google put out the Nexus One, and I still prefer it for a phone. But for a tablet I have to unwillingly go with an iPad next time, because that's where the good stuff is.

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