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Comment by moondistance | Hacker News Reader

I teach the intro. to HCI course at a Canadian university. The course project includes the design and implementation of a mobile app. I'll be using this article as evidence that my students should develop for Android rather than the iPhone.

Most would prefer to develop for the iPhone, and are taking steps to gain access to Macs and developer accounts for that purpose. This will be a nice push in the other direction.

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Sorry if this sounds mean, but using this article as evidence is a poor decision. The article contained one mans opinion with no support to any of his arguments. Yelp and FourSquare finally look as good as iPhone? Dad wants a tablet so he should get a $200 Android tab? Where is this $200 iPad competitor? It's not the Galaxy Tab that was just made available in Russia for $1200. There's no ne else.

By all means teach your class Android if they want it, but don't use _this_ article as proof that they should.

Thanks for the feedback. I definitely worded my comment too strongly. Of course that article isn't strong evidence.

We're supporting both Android and iPhone.

It sounds like you wish to force your own platform preference on your students. I'm not sure how this article counts as evidence for anything other than one individual has convinced himself iPhone vs Android is going the same way as Mac vs Windows.

Not in the least. We support both. Most students don't have Macs and feel pressure to develop for the iPhone.

Of course you're right - it isn't strong evidence, just another opinion.

From talking with other developers, developing a good interface for Android is much more painful and costly than developing one in iPhone. I caution you that you might get poor course evaluations because it might be more of a struggle to get something implemented in Android vs iPhone.

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