Android is for judicious, poor foreigners and not the hip kids that would pay 4x for a carwash ordered by phone. I recal the pruce gauging by travel companies who increase airfair by 10% when an Apple brpwser was detected.
Android is for startups
261–270 of 310 posts
Re: Android is for startups
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know I'm feeding a troll here (I've checked your comment history) but what the heck. What is a "task switcher"? And corollary question, do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Why would I bother to answer a deliberately offensive comment from someone who's own posting is deeply partisan?
I use both platforms on a daily basis. I used an iPhone exclusively for 3+ years before my first Android device. I'm working on products that help devs on both platforms to make their apps better.
Being a developer, I have solid reasons to prefer one over the other for my personal use but I know a large number of people prefer the other. If that makes me somehow "partisan", so be it.
Now, would you explain what you meant by a "task switcher"?
Or perhaps you could simply admit that you made that comment based on the name "Tasker" without having any idea what the heck it was. That would work too.
Re: Android is for startups
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 remot…
I love Android. I really only develop for Android. But to say the Android emulators are better than the iOS simulator (or even comparable) is hilarious to me. The reason everyone tests on hardware is because the emulator is %@$#ing slow. i7 @ 4.2GHz, 12 GB of RAM... the emulator still takes MINUTES to start and runs unusably slow. The iOS Simulator on the MBP work gave me (mid-2010) runs at basically native speed. I…
With regards to the speed, that's because the Android emulator is an emulator - it's converting ARM instructions to x86. Because of this, the Android emulator is actually a better representation of how apps run on real hardware than the iOS simulator.
There are x86 images available for the Android emulator, which will run as fast as your host machine will allow.
Re: Android is for startups
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, for Android it's far easier to get your app running on the device itself. The only thing you have to do is to connect the device to your computer and click Run in the IDE. Beginners can get something up and running within minutes, which includes the time to download the IDE and create a Hello World. The whole workflow runs well, as you get the logs in your IDE or whatever and you can do debugging a…
> Apple's provisioning process on the other hand is the most painful thing I ever experienced. Your information is years out of date. In XCode, you click 'use this device for development' and all the provisioning is done fully automatically. So no. It is not far easier to get your app running on the device itself. That is just false.
I get the impression that everyone in this thread with strong negative opinions, regardless of platform, hasn't spent more than half an hour on the other one.
Re: Android is for startups
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> This isn't some giant inconvenience that warrants completely switching a platform. WRONG. Contacting all 30 of your friends and WAITING for them to give you their device UUIDs and giving them long instructions on how to find it from iTunes if they don't know how? How is that easier than sending an APK to your friends which they can simply download and install? And you seem to just have glossed over how it's a waste…
You know, there are dozens of free apps out there that accept an email address as input, and provide a MIME encoded UDID as output.
I know it's a pain in the ass to buy an entire Apple computer just to develop for iOS, but crikey, why are you so angry about it?
Re: Android is for startups
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 remot…
I love Android. I really only develop for Android. But to say the Android emulators are better than the iOS simulator (or even comparable) is hilarious to me. The reason everyone tests on hardware is because the emulator is %@$#ing slow. i7 @ 4.2GHz, 12 GB of RAM... the emulator still takes MINUTES to start and runs unusably slow. The iOS Simulator on the MBP work gave me (mid-2010) runs at basically native speed. I…
I'm wondering whether you tried enabling acceleration (http://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html#acc...). If not, you might find the speedup rather shocking.
Re: Android is for startups
#267i don't have much to say, but i develop camera apps and i also started with Android and then moved to iOS. The transition was swift because of iOS's screen sizes/resolutions were well defined and straight forward, no fragmentation manager was required to handle different screens.
Although i was using a single device for Android, i couldn't help but write a generic manager to handle different screens rather than hardcode my prototype to a single device. On the other hand, iOS screen and camera previews are hardcoded by design, and that saved me a lot of time.
Android being open source helped quite a bit, since i could borrow all that code from the stock camera app, but it was tedious to say the least. When i transitioned to iOS i was surprised how fast i got my basic camera app to work (few hours perhaps).
There are other reasons why i find iOS to be superior for prototyping (i have only touched on the camera preview issue). One other example is the relative documentation. iOS documentation gets you going much faster when working with the camera at least.
Just my 2 cents.
Re: Android is for startups
#268Re: Android is for startups
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
If $100 a year would allow me to develop iOS apps on my Linux laptop I'd be fine with that. But $100 a year + paying for overpriced apple hardware doesn't sound appealing.
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.
Lenovo Thinkpad.
Re: Android is for startups
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 remot…
> 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).
Mine has also prototyped on both platforms and I will personally strangle anyone who suggests we do that on Android again. Slowly and painfully.
Sending applications for testing is somewhat more difficult on iOS, but that's really the only gripe we had. Between the useless documentation and the horrible development environment, it consistently takes us about twice as long to get an initial demo up and running on Android. This is especially on UI-heavy applications, considering that Android still doesn't have a decent UI builder.
(Just to put things into perspective: iOS's has incremental/convenience features over the original NeXTStep GUI builder, which basically puts Android's in a pre-1992 state).
The initial costs were higher for the Apple hardware, too, but even in the short term (1-3 months), it was worth it. This is especially true for a small company, that should prefer being punctual and keeping short deadlines.
> Finally, the Android developers that I know simply don't use the simulator, they always use hardware.
I also used hardware when developing for Android. However, that was not because I'm an uberdeveloper who has some obscure skill, it's simply because it sucks. It's slow, the debugger borks every once in a while, the management interface is unusable and while the list of integration features is longer, when you start crossing out those that break every other build you're pretty much left with just starting and stopping the simulator.