Android Vs. Ios - A Developers Perspective

By Author: Susan Smith
Total Articles: 132
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The Android vs. iOS debate is much like the cola wars of the 80s. They both have huge fan followings across the globe, are constantly trying to trump each other, and the owners companies for both don’t shy away from passing judgments (or snide remarks for that matter) about each other.

The 2 companies, while headquartered in locations less than 10 miles apart could not be farther apart in their approach to their mobile platforms. While Cupertino based Apple has a top-down, controlling approach to everything that bears the symbol of the bitten fruit, or gets loaded on it, Mountain View based Google follows a more open, do-it-yourself paradigm.

There is no dearth of literature explaining the differences between the two platforms. However, most of that material captures the user’s side of the story. What about the developers? With the mobile industry booming, and the enterprises embracing mobility, the mobile application development market is filled with countless opportunities for the lovers of bits and bytes to pit their skills against each other. The selection of the arena of the battle however, is sometimes ...
... confusing.

iOS – Money and fame

Just one perfunctory look at the Google play, the android marketplace, and Apple App Store, and you can see that the latter beats the former hands down in terms of the number of apps. This also implies that the number of developers developing for iOS is far more than those for Android.

One reason for this skew is quite simply, the moolah. Researches have shown that the iOS fans are far more ready to reach for their wallets than the green robot followers. Therefore developers follow the fruit. Another very important factor is the fragmentation that the Mountain View giant’s platform suffers from. The number of devices-OS combinations is mind-boggling. According to a popular gaming company, 99% of the Android products related support calls they get are about device incompatibility, and this when they support 707 different handsets! Also, unlike the carrier and manufacturer dependency of the upgrades in the search giant’s ecosystem, all iPhones and iPads get upgrades simultaneously across the world. Lastly, the dev tools and APIsin available to the iOS developers are far superior and easier.

Android – numbers do matter

Owning more than half of the world’s smartphone market, the little robot can’t be ignored either. Developing for the dessert-named platform also has its sweet motivations.
Firstly, the numbers can’t be ignored. Large number of users means large number of opportunities. Secondly, it is much easier for a developer to get an app into the loosely controlled Google Play compared to the highly regulated App Store. Further, the number of test devices available to the developers account in App Store is limited to 99 per year, which limits the devs seriously. The inter-app integrations available to the Mountain View enthusiasts are far better. This allows for creative monetization models too.

The Verdict

While the developers seem to clearly favor the sensibility and familiarity of the orchard, they can’t deny the popularity of the machine-man. Due to this, many developers are porting their apps from iOS to Android. The task however, is not easy, and the cross-platform tools don’t seem to be helping. The strong hope is that mobile development will someday be as affordable as web development, and that Google will improve its dev tools, and that the two giants will hug it out and allow for more collaoration

The author is associated with one of top mobile application development companies, Dallas mobile application development and iPad development company