Which Platform You Should Target For Your First App: Android Or iPhone? | Hacker News Reader

Which Platform You Should Target For Your First App: Android Or iPhone?

theappentrepreneur.com

21 pointspratikkanada39 comments

"Apple does not have a good debugging solution compared to Android for testing your apps."

That's a pretty absurd claim. Xcode has a fine debugger, comes with Instruments for various kinds of profiling, and can simulate multiple versions of iOS as well as multiple types of hardware (including various screen sizes).

I haven't done much Android development, but I have a hard time believing Android debugging is somehow magically significantly better than iOS debugging.

Avjinder, your post smells like a " Java sucks lol" style comment about eclipse. Eclipse is one if those softwares that people love to abstractly complain about without specifics. Also, you're doing something massively wrong if you think android lacks a proper debugger.

Also, hasn't the new emulator been out for nearly or over a year now? I tire of people whining because they refuse to upgrade their tools. Also, good luck with that simulator...

>I haven't done much Android development, but I have a hard time believing Android debugging is somehow magically significantly better than iOS debugging.

Oh, the irony. I don't know X, but I sure know Y is better than X. Keep up the good work, Einstein.

"I haven't done much of X" != "I don't know X".

Keep up the good work, Einstein.

I think it helps significantly to qualify what kind of app we're talking about (because then the demographics wanting each will vary) and revenue models. Game apps in general seem to do significantly better on the Apple store. At the very least, there's significantly more games in the Apple App Store than the Play Store. That likely has to do with the demographics that hold Android vs iOS phones. It also doesn't account for the alternative revenue model that most Android games take, that is the ad-driven model. If you're in it for the revenue, Android's ad-driven allowances (as much as I dislike them) may be a valid approach. For most other types of apps (productivity, education etc it's a toss up in my opinion, and will likely come down again to pricing model.

Might also help to consider where you're developing for. Different countries each have VASTLY different usage numbers for the different platforms. Big statistics that cover the whole globe aren't altogether that useful.

As a last point, I highly doubt that Android fragmentation is going to be the major reason why development is going to cost 20% more. That just seems wrong and arbitrary, especially with all the measures Google has taken to patch it (a la ICS). I could just as well say that the Apple app submission process is a hellish procedure that will cause massive delays and increased cost. It's really hard to say which is more costly to develop for due to all the variables.

Last throw in, just on an intuition, I'd develop for Android first, simply due to the significant reach in my country, greater experience with it and the type of app I'm considering. All in all, with so many variables, it's really hard to explicitly say.

The most important thing to consider when starting an app is what the landscape will look like in one or two years, or more. I'd bet on Android over Apple and Windows, but a fork of Android could beat them all.

Two years is long enough to build for all platforms...

It's simple: if you intend to sell the app, build first for iOS. If the app isn't something users will use daily, just use HTML. If neither of those are true, build for Android and iOS with iOS first.

How did you deduce this?

iOS users buy apps 6x as much as Android. The article itself says that.

HTML is fast to develop relative to native apps therefore if the app is ideally used infrequently, a native experience isn't worthwhile. There are exceptions, of course.

The last option is just a default last option.

That data is from mid 2011. The difference should be much smaller now, if there is any. Android had like 150-200 million devices back then. Now it has over 500 million.

This is why this article is BS, because most of the data used in it is extremely irrelevant for the Android ecosystem right now. This article should've been written in 2011. Not at the end of 2012. The Android ecosystem has grown and improved a lot since then.

Can you share data showing otherwise?

Here's an article from a few weeks ago supporting my claim: http://m.guardiannews.com/technology/appsblog/2012/dec/04/io...

Edit: to clarify, Android is doing better, but it is still no match for iOS.

I want to know how many of those apps replace basic functionality that is just built into Android. There are am absurd number of paid apps and services that have no purpose on android because the functionality is built into the OS or the Google Apps.

Interesting point. Could you elaborate?

The difference is still huge, to the point that there are still plenty of companies that ignore android simply because they can't monetize on it.

"HTML is fast to develop relative to native apps"

I know how to write HTML as well as Android XML or Dalvik (Java) code. I do not see where pounding out HTML code is faster than say pounding out Android XML code.

The only thing fast about it is theoretically you can use it on both Android and iOS. Most companies go native. Facebook tried doing this before running into massive problems and going native.

I also do not see what the frequency of app usage has to do with anything. I might have two app ideas - one used once a month by 60 million people, another used daily by 2 million people. If they are ad based, they will both probably bring in the same amount of money. Why should I go native on the 2 million app but not the 60 million app?

Comparing html and xml is silly. They are basically the same.

Platform independence was the point.

If people use the app daily, it's worth going native for the better performance.

Your example about 60m vs 2m is intentionally engineered to be an exception and I said there are exceptions.

As an investor in companies building mobile apps, I get asked this question constantly.

My response depends somewhat on the application and the market, but it's pretty clear at this point that these are two completely separate efforts. It's not quite as bad as developing for Mac vs. Windows, but close (and getting closer all the time.)

So I recommend two separate development efforts. I almost always recommend leading with iOS, but not syncing up the functionality perfectly so that some of the design experiments as you iterate happen on Android.

Tight communication between two separate teams is key. If you only have one dev working on the whole thing, just choose one - and - in most cases, this should be iOS

Been in both situations and IMO I would recommend Android, especially for a startup. Remember, release fast, release often is today's mantra and this simply cannot be done with Apple. I mean, you'll lose a whole month of Apple bureaucracy before having the least hintch that your app fails because of some bug in your live setup. Small details which you can't sand off when you have those LONG release cycles. Because of this I've always seen Android apps evolve much more faster and provide meaningful feedback from day one after the first beta release. With Apple you can't have a beta release, nothing can go wrong, everything has to be perfect the first time. For example, right now we have in both stores the same app with version 1.1.1 for iOS and 4.3.2 for Android. The IOS one is using the first version of our backend API while the Android one has forced the API to change four times because of business needs which have made the app evolve. So basically, we release an MVP for IOS which is there, idle. And we have an Android app which is evolving fast, is providing cohort data, feedback, business models and new ideas are being developed only for it. I would have waited after three or four android releases before going the IOS way.

If your app can be developed as a web app first that may be ideal. Building with a responsive design will allow it to work on both devices initially. Then you can watch your statistics to learn where is it more successful and build for that platform first.

iOS has negligible piracy? That's news to me.

To do piracy in iOS, you have to jailbreak iOS device. If you compare to Android, you can consider it negligible.

Nah uh.

You can simply resign an IPA as your own. There's a bunch of websites offering their signing certificates a service specifically for pirates.

Why on earth would anyone bother to pirate a $0.99 app???

I've absolutely no idea.

ios has piracy just like any other infrastructure, but its several levels of magnitude better than android.

No it's not. Several developers have already said iOS piracy is very comparable to Android piracy.

Also what a poorly written article - using data from 2011. Android has grown at least 2x since then, and it has somewhere between 30-40 billion downloads by now.

I think that piracy should be a non-concern at all. The first barrier is getting a product out there that someone, anyone is actually using. With the massive over saturation of the app stores, and the "if it is not on the first page it does not exist" mentality visibility is much bigger problem. If you have the audience from somewhere else you may be able to make them install an app. But otherwise - with the current incarnation of the walled gardens this will be a tough one.

I can't find the article right now, but there was recently a game developer that was crippled by piracy. Essentially the online part of the iOS game was swamped with pirate users, and there wasn't enough funding from real users for the servers to be sustainable or even worthwhile.

That is a different problem. If people play your game it means you are doing something right, so you must work on your revenue and communication with users strategy. Also if you have client server architecture you have much easier time just discarding the pirate users. If apple prevents you from distinguishing between types of users - that is serious platform deficiency. Otherwise it just requires a DB check before allowing access of the user to the server.

There have been cases where a product receives critical acclaim, is widely pirated and failed commercially.

XBOX 360 had the ability to pirate games since 2007-ish, and PS3 was much harder in this department. You didn't see abandonment of the X360 platform from the developers.

I don't think the App has any way of knowing if it is running without the proper signing or not. They can try and read outside of their sandbox, but Apple doesn't seem to acknowledge piracy as an issue, so the APi doesn't exist.

The article seems to be discussing the overall history, but it should focus on the present. Android has grown a lot in the past couple of years so how does it compare to iOS now?

For a non-game app, how hard it is to use cross-platform tools such as Sencha/PhoneGap to develop for both Android and iPhone (and maybe even for tablet) at the same time?

For most apps, an HTML wrapper like PhoneGap works great, so might as well do both at the same time.

Why not target both?

if you are relatively the nobody: Android (people try stuff only when it is free, though Iphone does have free aps, the notion around Iphone is the opposite, that all apps are paid ones. the reason being android is a free OS, IOS is not.

I've never heard a user say, "I don't want to buy apps because Samsung didn't build or license Android." Most users don't even know what that means.

so what do you intend to say my friend ?

The numbers in this article are quite out of date.

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