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Android is for startups

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211–220 of 310 posts

Re: Android is for startups

#211

Post by t1m »

>1990 is calling… and it wants its product development cycle back.

In the early 1990s, many developers were using an OS called Unix, with esoteric tools like vi, make, sh, and emacs. They wrote software in ancient languages like C, C++, Python, and Objective-C. Their programs communicated over TCP/IP networks using sockets. If you were lucky enough to be working on a military contract, you would be exchanging documents using XML and HTML papa SGML.

Everyone suffered until the major breakthroughs of Javascript and PHP.

Re: Android is for startups

#212

Post by hobs »

corresation wrote: post #186
chatmasta wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Two years ago the Play store yielded 1/10th the revenue of the App Store, by common metrics. One year ago it was 1/4. The most recent stat is 1/2 -- still months old. Do you see where this is going?" Yes, the Play Store revenue may be gaining on iTunes revenue. -- but per-app revenue in The Play Store has not necessarily grown. Revenue growth indicates nothing without the number of apps on each platform. Since the P…

The Play store has more apps, so the per-app revenue has not necessarily grown The overwhelming majority of apps on both platforms are free. Among what I could charitably call "pay-worthy" apps, my personal impression is that there are probably a magnitude more on the iOS platform. Indeed, this submission seems to talk to that, pointing out that there is more of an opening for quality apps on Android. I've never resp…

I salute you, because those metrics are garbage. Also, that's the point that I hearkened to the most as well, the screenshots of those apps hit home all my kind of janky android apps that work great and I love... but could easily be beaten by a bit of concerted effort.

I know there are a lot of arguments AGAINST the play store, but this is quite real and imo quite valid.

Re: Android is for startups

#213

Post by 9999 »

spot wrote: post #142
9999 wrote: post #74

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 t…

FYI android apps update automatically without intervention from the user. yet another way android wins. and then for good measure you repeat the nonsensical statement that google doesn't care. of course they want users to love android and increase their audience.

It's not just the annoyance of having to manually perform the update, it's that your device/network takes a performance hit when it happens. As for my use of the phrase "doesn't care," that was poorly chosen. But they care less. They see their users as the product and that leads to very different choices and a different relationship. I would argue that it leads to an inferior user experience in many ways.

Re: Android is for startups

#214

Post by general_failure »

threeseed wrote: post #200
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…

We are not comparing Dev tools. We are comparing Dev life cycle and methodologies

Re: Android is for startups

#215

Post by slewis »

threeseed wrote: post #200
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…

My company has prototyped on both platforms, and I strongly prefer Android for this purpose. Test flight is significantly more inconvenient for all parties than sending around Android apks. So is Apple's provisioning process for development (you'll certainly have to figure out how to re-provision your development devices a few times).

Android's OS integration also makes for better demos of our app. Since it's a remote control for another device it makes a lot of sense to have lock-screen and pull-down controls. We can't show that off on iOS.

Finally, the Android developers that I know simply don't use the simulator, they always use hardware. I found it strange coming from iOS, but I've gotten used to it. I weight this negative much lower than the deployment advantages that Android has for prototyping.

Of course in the end you'll have apps on both platforms, but here's a vote for doing early development on Android.

Re: Android is for startups

#216

Post by superuser2 »

nonchalance wrote: post #203
superuser2 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exercise for people who think Macs are overpriced: find a machine with a solid state drive, excellent battery life, well built case, and high quality keyboard and trackpad for substantially less than the price of a Macbook Air.

(writing this from 15" early 2013 rMBP) You can build a hackintosh with comparable specs for much cheaper than the equivalent Mac Pro, but the laptop space is no-contest

Sorry, should have specified laptop. The Mac Pro is a terrible way to purchase raw computing power - it's there mostly for OSX-based media professionals.

Re: Android is for startups

#217

Post by jmtame »

Three words: high fidelity prototypes. You can use them irregardless of the process to distribute your application. You should already have customer feedback on your app before you even commit engineering resources to write production quality code, and there's no excuse not to be prototyping and getting customer feedback far before you release it to the app store for the masses.

Re: Android is for startups

#218

Post by general_failure »

wizzard wrote: post #167

Sure, the release process might be easier on Android, but there are other factors involved in app development. Android is becoming a kind of curse word at my current job. Getting a working emulator can be a huge exercise in frustration (like for gMaps v2... forget it). Every and any feature or UI widget can break in unexpected ways on different devices. The tools are very functional but about as unintuitive and finic…

Sorry but it sounds like you are a android noob

Re: Android is for startups

#219

Post by Dogamondo »

shawkinaw wrote: post #198
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.)

Even easier than that in my experience. We've just been updating the provisioning profile with new devices and uploading the profile to Testflight, then sending testers a TF web link that they can click from their iOS device for ad hoc testing. As long as the UDID is in the provisioning profile, testers don't even need to register for a TF account. It really is a breeze.

Re: Android is for startups

#220

Post by general_failure »

brennenHN wrote: post #176

I love the point about iteration here, but I think this post is a little bit disingenuous. The problem with developing for Android as a startup is that baseline reliability is incredibly resource intensive. If you want your app to work on the most popular few devices, you will still have to spend a considerable amount of time and money testing the different configurations and fixing bugs that have nothing to do with…

There we go with this fragmentation bullshit. Say something concrete.

BTW I had the same problem - what works on iPad 3 didn't work on iPhone 4 and I fixes something that didn't work on touch.

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