

Android vs. iPhone: How Google is winning hearts of developers - cwan
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/06/android_gaining_ground_vs_iphone_in_hearts_and_minds_of_app_developers.html

======
credo
I wrote a blog post on a related topic last week.

Here is some more relevant data The folks at
[http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts-
tot...](http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts-total-2-of-
app-stores-1b/) say that only 13 Android apps have got more than 50,000
downloads. A greater number of iPhone apps have got more than a million
downloads.

This should give you a good indication of two things

(a) which platform successful developers focus on and

(b) how many Android users vote with their wallet to indicate that the Android
market has good apps.

 _Edit: It is interesting to see the downvotes canceling out some of the
upvotes :) I understand that some people may not like these numbers, but the
commenter/reply suggesting that the numbers are "misleading" (because money-
making iPhone apps are older) is mistaken.

Consider the fact that the iPhone Angry Birds app has got more than 4 million
downloads in less than 4 months. A paid iPhone app in the #1 slot for a month
can get more than a million downloads in that month. Now think about how many
downloads a #1 or #10 paid Android app can get in one month._

~~~
dminor
For those not likely destined for the top 10 and that don't have large
investments to recoup, these top 10 statistics are fairly irrelevant. A survey
among developers who ported their app to both platforms would be far more
enlightening.

For a company that spends a lot on development and marketing, and will likely
have a top 10 app, those top 10 numbers may certainly mean that their Android
investment won't pay off.

~~~
sadiq
An interesting datapoint is this guy:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/caq8f/iama_developer_w...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/caq8f/iama_developer_who_sells_the_same_app_both_in_the/)

Who made the same app for the iPhone and for Android. His ratio was 3:1, which
is roughly the ratio of handsets in the US iirc.

------
thought_alarm
Correction: How Google is _trying_ to win the hearts of developers.

Currently they only deliver a fraction of users to developers compared to the
App Store, their "Market" has suffered from recent outages and glitches,
they're struggling to cope with device and OS fragmentation, they force
developers to remit their own taxes, and there are some glaring omissions in
the countries and regions they support.

I think they need to try harder.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Also, their Marketplace is limited to just a couple of countries (which does
not include India). I would love to jump into Android development, but then
I'll have to manage payments myself.

The Android Marketplace cannot possibly compete with the AppStore. Not yet.

~~~
lut4rp
ORLY.

------
ww520
I'm actually building an Android app now instead of iPhone app. Here are the
rationals: 1. I don't have an iPhone nor an Android phone so there's no
inclination from the device point of view, 2. My last mac was 10 years old and
can't be used for IPhone development while Android app can be developed on
Windows/Linux machine. 3. The low downloads and low app numbers on Android
side indicates that it's a virgin market while the device numbers are huge.

We'll see how it goes.

------
jsz0
The big problem I have with Android apps is just how terrible the GUIs are.
They range from mediocre to unusable. For example:

K-9 Mail on Android: <http://tiny.cc/l965n>

Mail on iPhone: <http://tiny.cc/ss4e9>

HTC Mail on Android: <http://tiny.cc/b2f6m>

~~~
masklinn
I heard that the gmail client was much better than the android general mail
client. How do you feel about it?

(btw mail for iOS is not a very good mail client either, though it looks
pretty nice and has been improved a bit in iOS4)

~~~
jsz0
The GMail client is OK but it's lacking in the feature department. No option
for a 2-3 line preview of the message body, when composing a message you can't
pick contacts from your GMail contacts or local address book -- you have to
type in the addresses each time, as far as I can tell it doesn't support copy
& paste.

~~~
cheald
No multiline is a fair point. Message composition auto-fills the recipient
when you start typing - I can get to my intended recipient in 1-2 taps,
usually. I prefer it that way, though I can see how others might now. You can,
though, just tap a contact's email to start a new email to them. It certainly
does support copy-paste, though. I'm on 2.2, so that may be part of it,
perhaps?

~~~
biafra
Every input field supports "select all", cut, copy & paste at least since 1.5.

------
amichail
As I live in Canada, I don't even have the option of selling apps via the
Android Market.

~~~
mclin
Yea, wtf! And there's basically no word on wether they're even working on in.

~~~
tomjen3
They are not.

But it is a general problem with Google, they don't give a shit about you if
you aren't American (take google voice for example, they also only work in the
US).

------
tom_ilsinszki
The cutting edge apps will be developed for the iPhone first, and then ported
to Android (if it's even possible).

Reasons behind my claim:

 _Device fragmentation:_ If an app makes heavy use of a built-in sensor (eg.
accelerometer), it's much harder to test the app with all Android devices.
Some of the Android devices might not even have the sensor, that the app uses,
which will result in an angry customer. And angry customers are bad news, when
you aim for word-of-mouth marketing.

 _Low-level coding:_ With the iPhone, it's possible to implement cpu intensive
code blocks in assembly optimized for each generation iPhone, and thus
optimize the code, so that you make the most of your resources. If I'm not
mistaken Android only supports Java.

~~~
cma
>Some of the Android devices might not even have the sensor, that the app uses

Same goes for iPhone (e.g. the new gyro, the front facing camera).

~~~
ugh
Don’t forget the iPod touch. I’m really annoyed whenever some app doesn’t
check whether there is a camera and just displays a camera button, no matter
what (prompting the standard “no camera” dialog).

~~~
smokey_the_bear
Apple will generally not approve an app that does this if they notice

------
ryanjmo
So one problem I have with developing for the Android platform, is that I
don't know how to go about it and I don't understand the different Android
versions and which phones have which version of the OS and how many people
have each version.

Starting development for the iPhone was really simple, I went to one place on
Apples site, downloaded xcode and started building.

While I don't think it will have hard to figure out all the answers to my
questions once I get started, there are a lot of unknowns for me in terms of
the Android platform. My main point is this, it is much more clear how to get
started building for the iPhone, which I think gives Apple a large advantage.

~~~
ww520
For me, I just develop for the lowest common version, 1.5. Don't need the
latest feature in my app. The important thing is to figure out what's
interesting and useful for the end user, not the latest and greatest OS
feature.

~~~
ryanjmo
Cool everyone, thanks for the info. This makes sense that the software would
be forward compatible (I guess I should have assumed this, but I didn't even
know this was the case).

The only significant thing that we need are push notifications; in which
version did push notifications start, did Google change how they were done?

------
MWinther
It's a strange title... It doesn't seem to be much about Google winning the
hearts of anyone, even though this particular developer chose Android because
he was familiar with Java from before. Seems more like brain-winning to me.

It seems like a moderately good piece on someone who has chosen to develop for
Android though, even though I would have liked to see the conclusion (that the
choice to develop for Android was looking good) supported by some kind of
metric, I didn't get any feel for the success of his company so far.

------
donaq
In the places where Google Checkout supports seller accounts, perhaps. The
rest of us are mostly giving Android development a miss because we can't sell
apps.

~~~
extension
This seems like a serious shortcoming to me. I can't sell from Canada, for
example. Presumably this will improve with time.

I'm also really scared of dealing with Google's customer service if anything
goes wrong with my merchant account.

------
thinkcomp
This must be some sort of joke... Google certainly hasn't won my heart.
Working with Eclipse and their SDK makes me want to throw my computer out the
window, along with their phone.

~~~
martythemaniak
The title of the article was "Google winning the hearts of developers" not
"Google winning the heart of thinkcomp from Hacker News".

~~~
thinkcomp
Well, perhaps this was my error, but I considered myself a developer as
someone who had written Java code using the Android SDK for later deployment
on Android devices.

------
rbreve
After using the iphone for 2 years, I decided to try the nexus one Google gave
us at googleio. What I really like about the nexus one is the seamless
integration with google apps, gmail, running gtalk in the background etc., but
thats it. Most of the apps I have downloaded really sucks, their UI is
terrible and they crash often. The multitouch response on google maps is not
that good,the pinch doesn't respond that well. Google needs to polish a lot of
things, and we are still waiting for Froyo to come out.

~~~
kelnos
The multitouch issues on the N1 are actually because the touch screen on the
N1 is (when compared to the Droid) crap. Google has acknowledged this (sorta)
but say they can't do anything about it. There's actually an app called
"Multitouch Vis Test" that you can download and play with that easily
demonstrates how easily the touch screen gets confused when you have two
fingers on it.

------
bmalicoat
I thought the article would be all about how Google gives developers free
phones at all their conferences.

------
spicyj
The huge quotation mark in that pull quote looks ridiculous. (Well, the small
one does, too, but it's slightly less noticeable.)

------
moeffju
A huge impediment to developing apps for Android seem to be the absolutely
incredible shortcomings of Google Checkout. Most countries cannot even buy
paid apps, even fewer countries can publish paid apps. That kills pretty much
any incentive for many developers, especially with a new "iPhone devs make
bajillions" article every other day. The saddest thing about it is that Google
do not seem to be moving about this, at all. Android Apps, E-Commerce sites,
etc., lots of people are waiting for worldwide Google Checkout. I don't get
why Google don't get it.

------
parktheredcar
Let's not forget the awesome easter eggs thrown throughout- I've never been so
happy reading docs.

In Log...
[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/Log.html...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/Log.html#wtf%28java.lang.String,%20java.lang.String%29)

and SensorManager.
[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/Sens...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/SensorManager.html#constants)

------
nrbafna
True. Considering that one can develop android app on any machine but iPhone
SDK requires Mac OS (else they can't be published to the app store).

I suppose, Apple has lost a lot of hearts after the series of close-structured
and seemingly unfair app store policies. Though the fairness could be debated
and a different issue altogether.

------
freakwit
I don't think Google is winning hearts - rather, they are losing hearts more
slowly than Apple.

------
kqueue
It doesn't matter, what matters is the consumer.

~~~
code_duck
The consumers will go where the software is, in some cases. Take a look at the
Sega vs. Nintendo market of the 8-bit 80s in the US - Nintendo offered a
larger market, and locked up all the developers in exclusivity contracts. Even
with superior hardware, Sega couldn't compete because they couldn't get many
third party developers to develope for the Master System.

------
cracki
reads like advertising. where's the technical meat?

------
wallflower
If Google would only buy Titanium or Phonegap to overnight make it easier to
build Android apps. But they won't. Because they don't care about making
better tools.

------
paul9290
Google get rid of Google Checkout and allow users to pay via their cellphone
bills for apps.

Also my assessment of Android users vs. iPhone users is the latter buys their
music from iTunes, while a big portion of the former download from p2p and the
alike.

