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Android is for startups

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Re: Android is for startups

#191

Post by dvanduzer »

zmmmmm wrote: post #173

A lot of people seem to be missing the main point here. I don't think the article is actually advocating developing for Android and NOT iOS. I don't think it is even particularly advocating releasing on Android first. However starting your development on Android - as your first way of prototyping and finding your MVP - gives you a tremendous amount of agility and flexibility. You can create as many APKs as you want,…

If that's the point, start your prototype with Appcelerator, or to a lesser extent Kivy. Or popapp.in for that matter.

The dev distribution problem is thoroughly solved by testflightapp.com and I don't see anything else missing.

Re: Android is for startups

#192

Post by Rezo »

prehkugler wrote: post #79
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.

IntelliJ or the upcoming Android Studio (based on IntelliJ), which will eventually replace Eclipse as the recommended IDE, makes Android development much more pleasant. Give it a try.

Re: Android is for startups

#193

Post by engrenage »

zmmmmm wrote: post #185
engrenage wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more Android apps than iOS apps, and this advantage has always been present. So, why aren't Android apps already of superior quality?

Well, so many reasons ... until 4.0 the whole framework was ugly and the tools were very immature compared to where they are now. Few developers, especially ones who care about design, had much or any experience building apps for Android. A lot of early Android developers were either people with no experience at all or iOS developers who tried to apply iOS principles to Android development and failed hard. And it's p…

> But aside from all that, this discussion is not really about quality per se. It is about figuring out your business idea, getting it right.

But surely the same logic applies to this too. Why haven't we already seen all kinds of innovative business ideas emerging through the rapid iteration that Android supposedly enables?

Re: Android is for startups

#194

Post by jcromartie »

mooreds wrote: post #121
slantyyz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There is no way forward for (paid) Android apps that can make a living. You need to sell on iOS in order to make any sort of revenue. Yes, that is kind of sad. As someone who does pay for Android software, I imagine I'm in the minority. I've got extended family members who balk at the notion of paying even a dollar for software on Android. OTOH, I'm curious how many paid apps on the iOS App store actually hit the…

As of May 2012, 60% of developers didn't break even. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lo...

That's actually fantastic, because it means 40% of developers are breaking even while only probably 10% of them are making anything decent (just based on the 90% of everything is crud rule, which seems to hold quite true for mobile apps).

Re: Android is for startups

#195

Post by engrenage »

domness wrote: post #95

Hmm, I think a lot of people are missing the whole point in this article. I do around 60% Ruby on Rails, 35% iOS and 5% Android dev. The idea around a "lean" startup being, that an MVP, or each new feature, or even testing a change to a previous feature is usually done in quick succession. This being testing with current users over a period of say, a week, and then from the results, changes can be made and the team h…

> Also, that it would cost a lot in development time to get something "just right" for the App Store for it to be accepted, whereas with Android you can keep on iterating and pushing changes without having to spent a huge amount of time making everything look perfect, and be absolute minimal in terms of bugs.

This is highly misleading. The App Store review process does delay iteration, and heavily crash apps are rejected but there is no requirement to spend a huge amount of time making things look perfect or absolutely minimal in terms of bugs.

Re: Android is for startups

#196

Post by chrischen »

engrenage wrote: post #193
zmmmmm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, so many reasons ... until 4.0 the whole framework was ugly and the tools were very immature compared to where they are now. Few developers, especially ones who care about design, had much or any experience building apps for Android. A lot of early Android developers were either people with no experience at all or iOS developers who tried to apply iOS principles to Android development and failed hard. And it's p…

> But aside from all that, this discussion is not really about quality per se. It is about figuring out your business idea, getting it right. But surely the same logic applies to this too. Why haven't we already seen all kinds of innovative business ideas emerging through the rapid iteration that Android supposedly enables?

There are probably more innovative Android apps. Problem is nobody cares about the apps that much. When they choose a phone, they choose the phone first. Apps are an afterthought.

iPhone caught on for the phone itself, its ability to browse the web and make calls. iPhone didn't even start out with apps. Even then, apps didn't come into play because customers demanded them.

Re: Android is for startups

#198

Post by shawkinaw »

zmmmmm wrote: post #173

A lot of people seem to be missing the main point here. I don't think the article is actually advocating developing for Android and NOT iOS. I don't think it is even particularly advocating releasing on Android first. However starting your development on Android - as your first way of prototyping and finding your MVP - gives you a tremendous amount of agility and flexibility. You can create as many APKs as you want,…

With TestFlight, it's very un-fussy to send test builds on iOS as well. It's perhaps more fussy than with Android (I'm not sure), since you need the people to sign up and add their device to their TestFlight profile, and you then need to add the device UUID to your provisioning profile. But we're still talking about very quick turnaround (like 5 minutes.)

Re: Android is for startups

#199

Post by bobbles »

Things that annoy me about buying android apps since I switched to a nexus 4 this week:

No way to in-app upgrade to remove ads. what?? (you have to buy a separate app).

Heaps of games / apps that dont even provide an option to remove the ads.

I feel like a lot of android developers are going to miss out on people moving from iOS to android now that the OS has matured and has improved a lot of the areas that iOS users were worried about. These are people willing to whip out the card and pay because they're accustomed to it on iOS.

If there is no way for me to remove ads from an app I am more likely to uninstall it then use it with ads.

Re: Android is for startups

#200

Post by threeseed »

zmmmmm wrote: post #173

A lot of people seem to be missing the main point here. I don't think the article is actually advocating developing for Android and NOT iOS. I don't think it is even particularly advocating releasing on Android first. However starting your development on Android - as your first way of prototyping and finding your MVP - gives you a tremendous amount of agility and flexibility. You can create as many APKs as you want,…

None of what you said makes sense.

Firstly on iOS you can send as many IPAs as I want to friends, testers, colleagues etc provided I've gone through the 30s process of adding them to Apple's list. This isn't some giant inconvenience that warrants completely switching a platform.

Secondly if your app is intended to be cross platform. Then why would you start creating OS specific functionality you know will never work on the other platform. It's completely illogical.

iOS is likely to remain the primary platform for prototyping. Why ? Because it is just so much nicer. The iOS Simulator "just works" and exactly mirrors your target devices. Not the pathetic joke that comes with the Android SDK which has no relation to how your app will run on a Samsung versus HTC devices.

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