Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9999 | Hacker News Reader

The iOS development cycle works the way it does to protect Apple's customers. The people that pay for your application deserve and demand a certain level of quality. They also shouldn't be constantly bothered with updating your hastily developed, poorly tested, 'rapidly iterating' product.

As for Android, Google doesn't care. The person with the Android phone is not their customer, they're the product. Google is in the business of delivering users to advertisers. They are just barely in the business of making devices, and that's really just to feed more users to their advertisers by making a product that's as good as the iPhone and also to hedge against a single Android phone manufacturer from owning too much of the total Android market.

View on HN

FYI android apps update automatically without intervention from the user. yet another way android wins.

and then for good measure you repeat the nonsensical statement that google doesn't care. of course they want users to love android and increase their audience.

It's not just the annoyance of having to manually perform the update, it's that your device/network takes a performance hit when it happens. As for my use of the phrase "doesn't care," that was poorly chosen. But they care less. They see their users as the product and that leads to very different choices and a different relationship. I would argue that it leads to an inferior user experience in many ways.

I'm an android developer and I agree with this comment. The article as a whole paints a really bad picture of Apple's development process when, in honesty, I wish Google would learn a bit from the things Apple does really well. I really hope people don't think it's okay to ship an app with a typo in the title -- that's just lazy and irresponsible. While I wish the $99 fee was only required to publish an app (as opposed to being required to develop one), I'm still waiting for the day when Google can truly compete with iOS on a platform and tools level. In my opinion, Google has a long way to go on that front despite their increasing market share (and all revenue advantages that ensue).

Say what you will about quality differences in the tools, but the availability of the tools comes down heavily in Android's favor. Further, getting through the developer-license-acquisition process is hit or miss -- some people have it easy, some have it hard. Despite whatever advantages it has, iOS obstructs the ability to learn from users' needs and iterate quickly. Yes, there are things that could be better in the android ecosystem. But the ease of getting a bugfix to your users matters, and iOS fails on this.

You can develop an app without paying the fee, the only catch is that you need to pay the 99 dollars to test on actual hardware, instead of the iOS Simulator, which is somewhat silly but par for the course when it comes to Apple.

So preventing people from updating their app for a week even if they find bugs helps quality? Should we start making website changes only once a week to improve quality - I expect Heroku will implement a 5-day delay in deploys?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com