Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

There are, still, far more experienced iOS developers than there are Android developers. Some people think the learning curve and development effort are steeper and higher for Android. I'm inclined to believe them if only because I think Android is a more expressive app environment, and it takes longer to learn, more effort to design, and longer to implement apps that take full advantage of Android. It's just going to happen more slowly than the iOS app market.

I think there are going to be waves or generations of Android software. We are about at the end of the "porting wave" and we'll next have a wave of apps that really digs in to the modularity, IPC, background processing, and RPC technologies available in Android. Facebook was an ambitious first try at a suite of cooperating apps, and I expect more successful attempts to follow.

View on HN

In my opinion, it's just about the money. iOS users spend it more than Android users, thus more focus on iOS app development.

I completely disagree about the learning curve. In my experience, the iOS frameworks are quite complex and multi-layered (i.e. CoreData). Furthermore, you run into the fact that you have to learn Objective-C. The abundance of iOS experts probably has more to do with the fact that many Mac OSX developers easily transferred their skills to iOS development. With the Android platform, however many more developers know Java already, so that is less of a hurdle for your average dev.

In my anecdotal experience, for example, more college students try to do Android development, since they already know Java (taught in most college CS classes), whereas the students that try iOS development only do so because of the cachet of having an iPhone app.

What you say about college students is probably true now, but that has yet to have an impact on the wider pool of developers. Since college Java classes often start with interactive applications, stepping into Android after a bit of AWT is natural. I predict college Java courses will soon enough acknowledge that Android is interactive Java and start with Android.

Not really. Java has been a fairly standard educational language of choice for a loooong time. Well over a decade in the US educational/college system (reaching back to before 2000).

Core Data has to be the single-most difficult framework Apple offers (From their own documentation: "Core Data is not an entry-level technology.[0]"), so it makes a poor "ObjC is hard" starting point. Other than the message syntax, Objective-C is no harder to learn than any other language of it's type. Frankly, I think Android is needlessly complex, give that nearly ever app needs some combination of Activities, Receivers, Providers, etc, not to mention it's take on threading.

0. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/DataMan...

I did not cite Core Data when I argued that Obj-C is a hurdle. I cited Core Data as an example of the fact that iOS frameworks are complex. I also didn't claim that Objective-C is hard to learn. Merely that it presents a hurdle in a way that Java does not - any given developer is more likely to know Java than Obj-C, Java is more widely used and is general purpose language for a breathtaking variety of applications, whereas Objective-C is pretty much only used to Mac OSX apps and iOS apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com