

SDK shoot-out: Android vs. iPhone - snydeq
http://weblog.infoworld.com/fatalexception/archives/2008/09/sdk_shootout_an.html

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peregrine
The main difference is open-ness.

Android you can... Share any app you write without approval.

Apple you can.... Share any app you write as long as its approved and you pay
the fee.

So that's the main difference. Android uses Java or anything that can compile
down to their byte code. And for Apple you use Objective-C. Overall Android is
better for the openess but I say this only from an outside perspective.

I downloaded and setup the SDK within Eclipse yesterday and will play with it
today.

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jemmons
What a pointless article. It starts with unsupported assertions that Eclipse
and Java are better than XCode and ObjC (clearly a matter of opinion as I
_strongly_ believe the opposite, but moreover what does that have to do with
the SDK?) and ends by actually positing that the different SDKs don't matter
at all, thus invalidating the whole premise of the piece. Annoying!

~~~
ardit33
I think the oposite. With Eclipse, you can do what the f. you want. You can
build your own plugin, if ADD is not good enough for you.

With x-code, I am not sure how extensible is it (is it open source?).

Java is way much better and faster to develop than object-c. Problem is run-
time speed, (C/C++ are clearly better for games that java), and the second
problem is the Android API set is a mess, and bloated. It could have been a
lot nicer, but still it way better than Object-C. It allows almost full access
to the system.

X-Code is a lot more polished, (and prettier), while ADD is ugly, and
functional, and more open. Bottom line, depending on your background you might
like one or the other,

I feel using C/C++ and Object-C is a step backwards, were you have to take
care memory managements/leaks, and afraid not to crash the whole phone. While
in Android, everything is sandboxed, to minimize risks to the underlying
system. Plus there is already android (dalvik vm), running in Symbian, and
potentially other OSes down the road.

History repeats itself. Few years ago we had the BREW (C++) vs J2ME (Java)
battle, and J2ME won by a large margin.

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ajross
Article is mostly fluff. The most specific thing it says about either platform
is that "you use Eclipse by default for Android". NDA notwithstanding, I would
_love_ to see a hacker-level architecture comparison at some point. Anyone
have pointers?

~~~
rcoder
If I may be so biased as to offer my own take:
[http://rcoder.net/content/contrasting-the-iphone-and-
android...](http://rcoder.net/content/contrasting-the-iphone-and-android-
development-kits)

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iamdave
I love speculation that infers from thin air.

