Pros and cons of iOS and Android mobile app development | Hacker News Reader

Pros and cons of iOS and Android mobile app development

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17 pointspawel_ha18 comments

I develop for Android and iOS, and I usually create the iOS app first. Publish it to the market and kinda try to feel how the market responds, if its positive I make the Android down the road. If its negative, I try to add functionality and launch version 2. If its also negative, then I just kill the app.

Main issue with Android for me as a sole developer is, fragmentation and lack of paying users. The fragmentation part is really horrible, I have hired people to test my app extensively and regardless of how flawless I think my app is upon launch it crashes and burns. Designing an app for all the different screen sizes are extremely difficult. Testing on emulator is never adaquate.

As mentioned in the slide, iOS users pay for the app if they like it. When it comes to Android-users there is a get-everything-free culture. You can argue that if people won't buy then its the developers fault for not creating a good enough product, but I do believe its shared fault here.

How are your sales per demographic?

One of the reasons nontechnical users root their iOS devices is to install pirate copies.

Maybe some fellow compatriots will correct me as being wrong, but this happens a lot in Portugal, taking the people I know as sample.

Its exactly like the purchasing powers of the different countries. So in northern, west and central europe alot of people buy. Same for the commonwealth countries. In Asia, Hong Kong and Japan has more buy rate than the other countries. But apart from this there is really shocking amount of people who use the free credits and refuse to buy.

But I try to stay positive, I have considered blocking certain countries' app store.

I'd say the iOS simulator is better than the Android emulator, although it's much better than it was. But Xcode is in no way a better IDE than Android Studio. It's not even close. Xcode is a marginally usable text editor with almost no "IDE" features. Android Studio + Java is probably as good as a commercial IDE gets when it comes to code editing, generation, and refactoring.

But the iOS simulator is very limited (no push notifications, no camera) and developping on device with android is better in my opinion (easy port forwarding so you can access you local server as localhost)

On the other side, with react-native you get an uniform debugging experience and easy re-usability of your components.

Regardless of what you choose, always check your app on real devices before shipping.

Simulators have come a long way but they still don't replicate the real world.

There's definitely a load of Stockholm Syndrome in my post, but I really think that Xcode is a pretty decent IDE compared to most other IDE's bar Visual Studio and JetBrains products.

I'm also a big time Storyboard user, which can be a really great tool in expert hands.

All the expert iOS developers I know use storyboards very sparingly, if at all. They can be useful for really quickly throwing together a prototype but they just don't scale to complex apps. There's way too much string typing, no way to apply consistent styles, no way to compose views out of reusable elements, tons of headaches with version control etc etc.

>Android Studio + Java is probably as good as a commercial IDE gets when it comes to code editing, generation, and refactoring.

It is only when I started using Kotlin (with it's slightly weaker IDE plugin) that I realized how good AS is out of the box for Android development. Jetbrains and Google are doing an awesome work at providing a first grade IDE.

Every pro for Android save ad revenue is a con in reality.

Diverse devices, market share = Fragmentation, DPI issues, OEM breaking apps their images with customizations, popular hardware years behind the curve of computing power still coming out

Diverse demographics: I've seen people ban entire regions of Eastern Europe from their apps because of the 1 star generic "Is Virus" type of low effort review. I don't know what it is with Android and certain parts of the world that disproportionately misused reviews. Apple has a similar problem but to a much lesser extent, and the hybrid per version rating system helps.

Android also makes you deal with taxes in all those regions, essentially making you the seller instead of the store, where Apple handles all of that.

Blog version, adding Windows Phone: http://whallalabs.com/mobile-application-development-ios-vs-... (linked-to from halfway through the presentation)

In the third slide, "Apps have an audience 2.5x as big as mobile websites". I'd love to see data behind how the author came to that conclusion.

Isn't anyone who is able to download an app from an app store in the same audience as someone who would view a mobile web site? Beyond that, I feel like it's much harder to get a user to download an app than to view something on the mobile web. Downloading an app is a commitment for a user to allow a third party on to their device with many more privileges than a web site would get.

It's hard for me to take that statement at face value.

Hi, here is the source of the data: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepap...

Thanks looking forward to digging in to this. Great presentation by the way, was just having a little trouble around that one stat.

Thanks, glad you liked it!

On mobile Web is a 2nd class experience, even on Android having Google as owner.

How come all my Android devices are able to run OpenGL ES 3.x native applications without hiccups, and I always get broken WebGL experiences, if the site loads at all.

>6 apps with 40% more lines of code has shown that it costs 30% more to develop on Android.

Wow, my brain hurts after reading something that stupid

The argument that one platform is cheaper to develop in than the other based on the lines of codes just put me off.

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