19 ms·

Android is for startups

514 points by willwhitney 13y ago

mynd 13y ago
I think a little barrier to entry is a good thing. App Store is saturated as it is.
- leokun 13y ago
  Right because who wouldn't want more choice? Those that got there first must obviously be better.
- delinka 13y ago
  But the only barrier is the $99 fee for the dev account. Register as an individual and it's "instant access." And that's why the App Store is saturated. They set up the barriers the moment you want to register a company. Presumably so that you can't pretend to be representing someone else's company.
samspenc 13y ago
Excellent write-up. As a mobile developer, this was my experience publishing Android apps to Play store as well. Also, my theory is that once there are enough quality apps on Android, we will start to see the center of popularity shift to Android from iOS.
grosen 13y ago
Free apps do well on Android. Paid apps (Outright & Free + In App Purchases) generate more revenue on iOS. Being able to show traction is important for startups but, being able to show increased revenue is equally if not more important. Until Android on a whole proves to be more lucrative to monetize apps, many developers will continue building iOS first (imho).
- ajross 13y ago
  Your statement is true, but sort of missing the point of the article. Sure, "many" developers "will" wait "until" Android "proves" better. But some won't, and there is value in being part of the early ones to jump. The article is advocating jumping now and gives some arguments (not all of them convincing IMHO) as to why that's a good idea. You're just saying that not everyone will take the advice. Well, yeah. :)
  - grosen 13y ago
    Android might never prove better. When/if it ever does then I will reevaluate and deal with being a fast follower rather than a first mover. However, it is premature at this stage to state that Android is the better platform for startups.
discostrings 13y ago
Being in the process of registering my LLC for an iOS Apple Developer account, I couldn't agree more. It's been over two months now of back-and-forth with Apple and Dun & Bradstreet, and the end is still not in sight. All I'd like them to do is take my $100 and give me the ability to test the free app I'm making on a device and then publish it, but apparently Apple feels a longer-than-two-month turnaround time is acceptable. (And yes, I know I could just register a personal account and then slowly convert it to an LLC account. I shouldn't have to do that. As someone who's somewhat interested in their platform but not dying to develop for it, I'm not going to do that.)
- mattmanser 13y ago
  Bit of a strange thing to say. Yes, I could solve it easily, but I'm not going to do that.
  - discostrings 13y ago
    It's not really a solution--it's a hack to get around their horrible process. I want to correctly publish what belongs to and was created by the LLC under the name of the LLC, not my own name.
    - fspeech 13y ago
      Yes. What you are doing makes sense from a legal liability point of view, which is why you would set up a LLC in the first place.
- eurleif 13y ago
  I started off with a sole proprietor account, and then converted it to an LLC. It was "pending" for months. During that time, my Apple developer registration expired, and I renewed it... but because I renewed it for the LLC, not the sole proprietorship, and the LLC was "pending", my account expired anyway, and my app was removed from the store. Thanks, Apple.
- killahpriest 13y ago
avolcano 13y ago
> But if you build an app on Android that’s on par with the design quality you’re used to on iOS, your users will love you. The press will love you. Gizmodo will feature your app just so they’ll have a nice header image for their “Android Apps of the Week” post. That's nice, but will it translate into sales? Probably not, given the horror stories of Android piracy that seem to come out every few weeks (particularly in the gaming market). Of course, many startups profit in hype instead of dollars, so maybe that's irrelevant.
- opendomain 13y ago
  Android Apss are easier to deploy, but becuase of that, you get bad code - or WORSE - viruses! There are several Andoid apps that are Malware - there is not one in Apple App store.
  - watty 13y ago
    So you're saying that Android should make it more difficult to deploy to decrease malware and bad code? Come on, stop drinking the kool aid.
    - drp4929 13y ago
      Trick is to find a balance in the process so that author of an App is legally identifiable. This is to avoid episodes like "Fake Angry Bird App" and "Fake Mobile Banking App". IMO, when I download ETrade App on my smartphone, it is good to know that someone checked that it was submitted by someone who is from ETrade really. If the process is rigorous for E*Trade, so be it. But as an end user I'd prefer it to be that way instead of making it _my_ responsible to verify before installing the app.
      - fpgeek 13y ago
        Note that this is a problem both stores share: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/08/how-app-store-grifters-clone-an-overnight-success-to-make-a-quick-buck/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/08/how-app-store-grifters-... From what I understand, absent a legal judgment Apple doesn't do much to police copycats, misleading names and the like.
robbfitzsimmons 13y ago
As a primarily-iOS user / developer who also has an Android tablet (last year's Nexus 7), completely agree with both points made here. [The first being that Android development is better, and the second being that the vast majority Android apps currently suck compared to the iOS equivalent, making for a nice opportunity.] It's hard enough to peg a real user need and deliver on that need in a satisfying, sticky way. It's at the core of what a startup needs to do to cultivate that product development discipline as a team, and tools that make that harder are insult to injury. As others have mentioned, though, none of these app startups are launching just for a smooth development experience. And Android just hasn't shown that users will reliably upgrade their OS, much less pay for apps like iOS users do. Until that changes, even if the better dev experience will accelerate a shift, it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem on app quality.
- bane 13y ago
  > making for a nice opportunity One tricky thing is that even if your app is really nicely crafted, it might be hard for users to find it without lots of out-of-play-store promotion.
- jcromartie 13y ago
  > making for a nice opportunity You are assuming that there is demand for anything but free apps. I know that I personally would kill to pay for top-quality Android apps like I do on iOS, but I don't think I speak for the majority of Android users. Based on everything that I've seen, they just don't want to pay.
  - GVIrish 13y ago
    Industry numbers I've seen suggest that this is changing rapidly. I think what we're seeing is that Android is attracting a lot more high end smartphone customers and they are buying more apps. The gap is still big, but it is shrinking rapidly.
  - robbfitzsimmons 13y ago
    Completely agreed (and would also kill to pay); what I meant at the end of my comment that it's that it's a nice opportunity predicated on being a quality app right when the market starts to shift. Which I think is what Will's betting on.
luscious 13y ago
Does this article need to exist? Who is this preaching to?
zerop 13y ago
Yes.. developers might prefer android over iOS.. but end of the day iOS apps get you business..IMO...tell me which android apps sell better than their counterpart iOS apps?
- willwhitney 13y ago
  Pocket Casts actually wrote a great blog post about this: http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2013/02/20/why-android-first/ http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2013/02/20/why-android-first/ Because some niches are really poorly covered on Android, apps that fill those may have greater success than they would on iOS.
  - r00fus 13y ago
    Is niche-filling in the shadow of a large corporation (Google) really a sustainable way to run a business? Software-savvy giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon pretty much don't care about stomping on your little niche (esp. if it's due to a deficiency in the platform/system) if it helps them one-up their competitor.
badman_ting 13y ago
This is such a weird piece. It seems to get why, despite the onerous restrictions Apple puts on devs, iOS has great apps and huge numbers in every direction, but then just says Android is better. Perhaps a better argument would be to understand why the gain is worth the pain, and then move to saying that the gain without the pain would be even sweeter. I dunno, I make web stuff. I just like watching you guys duke it out.
- mooreds 13y ago
  What I took from the piece is that Android is far more developer friendly in terms of ease of development, deployment to devices for testing, and releasing. Whether that is enough to make it a 'better' platform depends on what your needs are. If I were doing a mobile startup and needed fast feedback on devices, Android's fast turnaround sure would be interesting. Not the deciding factor, but definitely a check in the Android column.
antidaily 13y ago
_______________ is broken.
jcromartie 13y ago
I know that Android users are starved for slick apps that look good and work well, because I'm one of them (when using my Nexus 7). But as a developer I know that I can't make money from them. There is no way forward for (paid) Android apps that can make a living. You need to sell on iOS in order to make any sort of revenue. So if your startup is built on a free app, then by all means use Android to test your idea. But if you want to make things and sell them for money, then putting up with the App Store model is more than worth the amount of money you can make compared to Android.
- KirinDave 13y ago
  > I know that Android users are starved for slick apps that look good and work well, because I'm one of them (when using my Nexus 7). But as a developer I know that I can't make money from them. > There is no way forward for (paid) Android apps that can make a living. Why do you say this? I concede it may be true for games, but games are actually one of the hardest places to make a living. Make not-game apps and your expectation of payment and your likelihood of piracy plummet.
  - jcromartie 13y ago
    Maybe it is just for games, but that's the segment I pay the most attention to. I'd love to be proven wrong through experience, so maybe I'll throw some Android apps out there.
    - KirinDave 13y ago
      Personally, I know 3 people who make a living doing productivity and utility apps on Android now. I've actually never personally met an indy iOS developer making their money on not-games, come to think of it. I easily spend $15-30/mo on android apps. I go out of my way to buy ad-less versions but I do appreciate that I can try an app for a few days even with an ugly, unfit ad.
- slantyyz 13y ago
  >> There is no way forward for (paid) Android apps that can make a living. You need to sell on iOS in order to make any sort of revenue. Yes, that is kind of sad. As someone who does pay for Android software, I imagine I'm in the minority. I've got extended family members who balk at the notion of paying even a dollar for software on Android. OTOH, I'm curious how many paid apps on the iOS App store actually hit the break-even point.
venomsnake 13y ago
Now ... we tried to register apple dev account in late 2010 for my company. The first thing they required was a lot of documents. We send them. Then came the payment ... they refused to accept our credit card and refused non credit card payment methods. The email we got back from apple was a exercise in absurdity - (this was 2012 already after a lot of back and forth) - they wanted the details of the company credit card send to them BY FAX. In 2012 they wanted for us to send the full details of a credit card written on paper. By fax. So we told them to fuck off. Triple checked - it was not scam or phishing letter. Then we made a simple single developer account ... personal. It took only a month.
lukabratos 13y ago
"Knock, knock." "Who’s there?" "Very long pause…." "Java."
- babebridou 13y ago
  "2 weeks later..." "[NSString stringWithFormat: @"%@ who?", result];"
  - ipodize 13y ago
    8 months later: "ArithmeticException - joke doesn't add up"
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      10 months later "random crashes due to pointer misuse".
PStamatiou 13y ago
Great post -- As a newly diehard Android user, I will agree that while Android is definitely getting some amazing and beautiful apps, it's nothing like on the App Store. If you spend the time to design a beautiful app, there is a larger opportunity for you to unseat very popular Android apps. Android users crave great design too. Start building. http://paulstamatiou.com/android-is-better http://paulstamatiou.com/android-is-better
gte910h 13y ago
I'm a 3rd party iOS developer: If you want to make money by directly selling something, or need people who constantly use your app => iOS still seems to have higher engagement and higher revenue. If you want to make money by having a thing you're giving away to tons of people who need to only use your app briefly, android MIGHT be the case for tomorrow and for certain communities, today. That said, "Android" isn't a monolith. I think Google did a tremendously good thing by incorporating so many new services into the Play Store rather than into the almost-never-updated core OS, and you should be looking at targeting THAT, not years old versions of Android, to get an updated, easy to maintain android target you do aside an iOS target. People will complain, but will also get new phones that have the Google play store with modern services. With both versions, it's always really important to measure cost per user on a version by version, platform by platform basis.
ensmotko 13y ago
Another thing that bothers me with development for iOS is that you need apple hardware and software. I can't develop an iOS on my Linux machine (I've tried running OSX in virtualbox, but it's slow and not to mention illegal). I really wish Apple would make their platform a little more available. Lowering the $100 yearly fee would be a good start...
- jbjohns 13y ago
  If you can't even afford $100 a year you probably can afford anything you would need to develop for the platform (e.g. a mac).
  - ensmotko 13y ago
    If $100 a year would allow me to develop iOS apps on my Linux laptop I'd be fine with that. But $100 a year + paying for overpriced apple hardware doesn't sound appealing.
    - xutopia 13y ago
      And that is where the line divides. Android users are like you... they don't want to pay for software and go for cheaper hardware when they can.
      - BlackDeath3 13y ago
        To speak nothing of whether or not that is actually true, what is the problem with opting for cheaper hardware?
      - kintamanimatt 13y ago
        I'm a Linux and Android user. My Android phone wasn't any cheaper than an iPhone and I can most certainly afford any Apple hardware I want. I also don't use Linux because I'm cheap, I use Linux because I love it. The hardware was exactly what I wanted too. I don't develop for iOS because I don't want to own a Mac. I (as a long-time Linux user) find OS X incredibly frustrating. There's also absolutely no reason to force developers to use a particular brand of hardware or a particular operating system to develop for a particular phone.
leemhoffman 13y ago
The IOS Development process is outdated and kind of crappy, but there are simple tacitly accepted solutions that fix virtually all of the issues. Specifically: - Hockey App For Pre Public Distribution - Auto Updates, One Click Link Install (no need to join a google group) - Enterprise account - no device ids, send the link to anyone The dev cycle on mobile is slower, and more waterfall, but there is no excuse to not be iterating on anything more than 3-5 day cycles on either android or IOS.
shmerl 13y ago
I'd say Sailfish is for startups.
trimbo 13y ago
VCs all have iPhones. This is the #1 reason to develop for iPhone first.
- gonzo 13y ago
  VCs all have iPhones because the majority of people who are willing to pay for a phone or apps prefer iOS. it's really that simple.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > VCs all have iPhones. Fred Wilson would beg to differ (at least until a few weeks ago, and even then, his reasons for switching are not what you might think). Seriously, no (good) VC is going to decline to invest just because you're Android-first instead of iOS-first, if that's a decision that actually makes sense for your target market.
- general_failure 13y ago
  So how many VCs have you profiled to come to this conclusion?
andrewcamel 13y ago
If you're alright ignoring the far more profitable iOS market, then sure, Android is better. But if you're trying to operate a startup that actually needs to make money, it is not a smart business decision to ignore it. Complain as much as you want, but iOS still provides a better opportunity than Android in the very large majority of cases and because of that, I'm ok dealing with the headaches that come with it.
andrewcamel 13y ago
If you're alright ignoring the far more profitable iOS market, then sure, Android is better. But if you're trying to operate a startup that actually needs to make money, it is not a smart business decision to ignore it. Complain as much as you want, but iOS still provides a better opportunity than Android in the very large majority of cases and because of that, I'm ok dealing with the headaches that come with it.
benihana 13y ago
Another post on the top of Hacker News making the mistake of thinking paying customers give a crap about how easy it is to [write|deploy|test|debug] your app. Even with all the pain associated with the App Store people still write more apps for it than ever. Why? Cause people pay for apps there. They don't on the Play Store.
- myko 13y ago
  > Why? Cause people pay for apps there. They don't on the Play Store. Is this based on your opinion, or what?
  - rpedela 13y ago
    There is some research that backs up the claim. http://www.idigitaltimes.com/articles/17985/20130531/ios-app-sales-vs-android-apples-itunes.htm http://www.idigitaltimes.com/articles/17985/20130531/ios-app...
  - calbear81 13y ago
    There's some evidence of that here: http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-index-market-q2-2013/ http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-index-market-q2-2013/ People on iOS are more willing to buy apps and do more in-app purchases but the gap doesn't seem that wide to bridge, especially as iOS users move to Android.
    - winslow 13y ago
      I think a lot of that comes from the iTunes gift cards that everybody seems to get for Christmas, Birthdays, etc. I purchased my first app with "real" money a month or two ago for android.
      - vmarsy 13y ago
        Even if it's true, I don't think developers care if the money they got at the end of the month comes from a gift card or a credit card. Google Play gift cards exist too, I don't know if you can buy music with it though, if not it's logic that iTunes cards sells better.
namenotrequired 13y ago
As Paul Graham said... http://paulgraham.com/apple.html http://paulgraham.com/apple.html
nathan_long 13y ago
Semi-related rant: My sole experience with Apple Developer stuff was being forced to register as one to get some basic command-line tools on my Mac. They made me complete a questionnaire about exactly which kinds of Apple products I wanted to develop for, and "none" wasn't an option. That's kind of a weird, Apple-centric worldview. "Errrm, I'm doing web development..."
- engrenage 13y ago
  You don't need to register as a developer to get the command line tools.
  - rsynnott 13y ago
    Some of the Java development tools (JNI-related stuff), oddly, used to require (free) registration. Don't think they do any more, though.
umsm 13y ago
I don't agree with this. Basically the author thinks that you can test the market if a particular idea / app is worth making by releasing on Android first. The problem is that the android users will most likely hate the UI and the bugs as it will probably be thrown together. When releasing an app on iOS, you don't have to include ALL features, you can release an app that is well designed and functions well with limited functionality. Then add features as you need to. That's what we did when we released our app. We released for iOS first and then for android, but we gradually added features as needed or wanted.
- ajross 13y ago
  I'm not following your arguments at all. Android apps must inherently be buggy and "thrown together"? Android apps must "include ALL features" before release?
  - umsm 13y ago
    From what I understood from the article: - You can iterate quickly on android. If you notice that people don't care for your app, you can stop at the splash screen I assume. Or stop when you've added enough features that and yet no one is downloading. - When you release on android, it's almost instant. This means that you don't test it as well as you should because you know you can always patch it tomorrow.
- jamesjguthrie 13y ago
  > you don't have to include ALL features You sure do have to include a lot of features though. You've no chance if your app is a simple one because you'll get hit with one of these: 2.12: Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected
  - umsm 13y ago
    I believe you are referring to the app store guidelines. The article mentions the android market place.
dasil003 13y ago
This seems like really forced wishful thinking. Sure Apple makes you jump through a lot of annoying hoops, but it doesn't matter how cynical you are you can't hand-wave away the security benefits, and you certainly can't ignore the revenue differentials. I think Android is moving in the right direction, and actually I've used it as my primary phone for years now (I've owned 2 Nexus phones and the old G1), but waiting 5 days for approval (which is the average I've experienced for 6 submissions over the last 2 months) is not as big of a hurdle as the article paints. There's certainly nothing that requires waterfall development or "waiting months".
x0054 13y ago
I think the difference in development comes in when you need to do some hardware testing. With apple you need to design for 3 different display sizes, with 2 resolutions each. You also have to test your product on (at most) 12 different devices, and that's if you really want to cover the field. On the other hand, with Android, if you want to do it right, you need to design for hundreds of different screen sizes, all kinds of different aspect ratios and resolutions, and hundreds of different hardware devices. Or you can forgo all that, and just assume (incorrectly) that majority of the Android users run the latest and greatest Galaxy hardware.
- dlhavema 13y ago
  there was an article posted here a few weeks ago that talked about an android development company/group that boiled it down to ~10 major categories of devices that they needed to test with to get maximum device acceptance. So for them, unless a whole category of device comes out, like a smart watch for example, they do not need to have every device to test. and this encompassed screen sizes and OS versions.
  - prehkugler 13y ago
    > So for them, unless a whole category of device comes out, like a smart watch for example, they do not need to have every device to test. Cue the Samsung Galaxy Gear.
  - richardwhiuk 13y ago
    You can test on a limited range, but you will hit handset specific bugs - its just a fact of life on Android.
- KirinDave 13y ago
  You can shave away a LOT of form factors if you just agree to cut off development before Android 4.0. This is tough for people to resolve to do, but in the US that's 60% of the market. I'd rather ship a good product to 60% of the people in a reasonable amount of time, rather than spending a ton of time working on tiny slices of the last 40% and limiting what the product can do overall. You also end up targeting much newer devices and OS versions, which evades a lot of problems with piracy.
rjvir 13y ago
While the 5-10 day approval process to get the App Store is inconvenient for developers, it gets a disproportionate amount of attention. The limiting factor in software development is and will remain to be engineering resources. Building on the Apple ecosystem still takes considerably less time and effort to complete an app than Android, due to consistent and up-to-date hardware & software, common design patterns, a robust developer ecosystem, and generally a more sophisticated development platform.
- prehkugler 13y ago
  As a mobile developer who has worked on both platforms, I agree wholeheartedly with this. Xcode and Interface Builder is much easier to use than Eclipse (I found myself constantly editing the raw XML interface files). And I find the UIKit API much simpler to use (for most cases) than Android's Activity-based SDK.
  - Rezo 13y ago
    IntelliJ or the upcoming Android Studio (based on IntelliJ), which will eventually replace Eclipse as the recommended IDE, makes Android development much more pleasant. Give it a try.
alayne 13y ago
Why don't they build a web app if they want to iterate faster?
- veeti 13y ago
  Because they suck ass.
- rimantas 13y ago
  The only thing web app can make you achieve faster is to reach end user. Anything else will be so much faster using native SDK it is not even funny (assuming you have equal knowledge of either technology).
  - zwrose 13y ago
    Sure, but isn't that the key of Lean Startup, which is what OP was hammering on anyway? Web apps do perform less optimally, but they are also platform independent and can be done quickly. Why not start there, make sure you are hitting the right user needs, then invest in app development?
tomasien 13y ago
It's perfectly fine to argue the merits of Android development, but arguing that it's hard to run an app on your own device using XCode is dishonest. It handles provisioning profiles automatically, and you can even hit "fix it" if it doesn't find a valid one when you try to run it. I've been building an app for Android for 2 weeks now, and I still can't get the phone settings on an Android phone to use it for development. This may be MY problem because I'm a terrible developer, but it's still a problem.
- krschultz 13y ago
  "Note: On Android 4.2 and newer, Developer options is hidden by default. To make it available, go to Settings > About phone and tap Build number seven times. Return to the previous screen to find Developer options." http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html
  - tomasien 13y ago
    I know man, still not working. No idea why, probably just something I'm missing because Eclipse is ugly and difficult as sin.
    - josteink 13y ago
      Dump Eclipse. No really. New Android studio based on JetBrains' IntelliJ is so much better it makes me wonder how I would ever endure using Eclipse for anything. Try it. It'll take you less than 5 minutes from download to having your hello world on device, in debugging mode. It'll be the single best thing you did all day.
joshstrange 13y ago
Have you ever tried TestFlight for iOS testing/dev? I'm not saying the Apple process is perfect (I agree it sucks) but TestFlight makes getting test builds out much easier.
9999 13y ago
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.
- spot 13y ago
  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.
  - 9999 13y ago
    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.
- jordanthoms 13y ago
  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?
- dycow 13y ago
  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).
anigbrowl 13y ago
Design is an easy win on Android, but it's the suck for any kind of audio processing because of the horrendous lag. Like MS before them, Google completely ignored the needs/requests of musicians for years on end, and as a result all the good apps are for iPad. The only two Android audio apps I can think of that are worth looking at are Caustic and FruityLoops, and neither is particularly performance-friendly. I was using a remote control MIDI app for a while called Humatic but the developer said device fragmentation was such a miserable experience that he never wants to develop on Android again. I've been using Android since Google put out the Nexus One, and I still prefer it for a phone. But for a tablet I have to unwillingly go with an iPad next time, because that's where the good stuff is.
liyanage 13y ago
Having to make sure that everything is perfect before you ship As a user, that sounds pretty good to me...
scrrr 13y ago
Sorry, but this is not a good article. Instead of telling me what to do based on a small dataset of evidence, I'd much rather read what you have done. What worked for you. I don't think the author knows what he is talking about.
Apocryphon 13y ago
This is the most tiresome religious war. While it's interesting to compare and contrast development experiences between Android and iOS, this comment thread seems mostly a lot of outrage between partisans of both platforms. Which makes me wonder where devs who use PhoneGap and other bridge frameworks, or HTML5, feel about all of this.
domness 13y ago
Hmm, I think a lot of people are missing the whole point in this article. I do around 60% Ruby on Rails, 35% iOS and 5% Android dev. The idea around a "lean" startup being, that an MVP, or each new feature, or even testing a change to a previous feature is usually done in quick succession. This being testing with current users over a period of say, a week, and then from the results, changes can be made and the team have learned from the testing. So really, Android allows for this quick succession of testing features and iterating as quick as possible, with even to a few hours turnaround. Also, that it would cost a lot in development time to get something "just right" for the App Store for it to be accepted, whereas with Android you can keep on iterating and pushing changes without having to spent a huge amount of time making everything look perfect, and be absolute minimal in terms of bugs. I love iOS development, and yes, I agree with most people on here about the revenue from iOS, the people paying for apps, Apple's process of helping keep out most malware etc. etc., but for the sake of a "lean" startup, spending extra weeks testing apps making sure it's completely bug free and "looking good enough" for iOS, as well as the wait for Apple to accept the application (and then for users to download the update, in the case of iOS 7, this has been solved), Android is a much better dev option for these changes. Of course, when the team knows that the app is something that people care for, and they have a decent knowledge of what users want, what features they use, and the kind of value that the mobile app brings to them, then they can go ahead and make the best possible iOS app. TL;DR Saving time, money and quick iterations, learning from customers and getting quick data for problem validation, is much easier and faster on Android, than the process on iOS. Think Lean Startup.
- ryandrake 13y ago
  As a mobile app user, I don't want daily updates from your app as you "iterate" away and try to figure out what to build. I want to download the finished product that works. I'm not your free beta testing service. If you want to test concepts, do proper market research.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - domness 13y ago
grbalaffa 13y ago
All this talk about process, but not a word about the quality of the SDK itself. Android is quite frankly still very far behind when it comes to really basic things. Here's just one example: iOS has had easy support for custom fonts in native UI elements since the early days, meanwhile here is the situation on Android: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2973270/using-a-custom-typeface-in-android http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2973270/using-a-custom-ty... (Yes, the thread was started in 2010, but scroll to the bottom to see more recent comments -- things have scarcely gotten any better.) Anyone who has actually deployed a non-trivial app on both Android and iOS knows quite well which one is the "better" development environment.
- akmiller 13y ago
  This is anecdotal (but frankly so is yours)... We have mainly been doing iOS apps but we are hearing demand from customers about having an option in Android so one of our developers (who is definitely much more of an Apple fan) has been experimenting with the Android SDK and he has been very impressed with the Android SDK. He has found many things to be far easier in the Android SDK than with iOS. His main complaint is with the emulator which is extremely frustrating to use but since it's dead easy to use your device that's not as big of a deal.
  - grbalaffa 13y ago
    At least I gave an example. "Many things" are not just easier, but "far" easier? Like what? I've got plenty more examples, but I'd really like to hear about these "many" things which are "far" easier than in iOS.
franklee0987 13y ago
I cant believe I just bought an awesome silver Nissan 370Z Coupe from only workin parttime on a computer… get redirected here big57.com
chj 13y ago
The artificial limitations around iOS are contrary to what developers should believe in -- the freedom to write and distribute software on a platform without approval from some central authority. Despite the fact that iOS has much better design and comes with much better developer tools, Android is nowadays the better choice.
markshepard 13y ago
Interestingly the opposite is true in our case. We are a small startup that has apps available both in Apple and Android. But because it is hard to develop and deploy a successful app in iOS than in android, it keeps competition at bay. In Android, lot of half baked apps pollute the store (and the fake ratings and review destroy any sort of app discovery) that it is simply not worth it. While we have had our share of frusturation with the apple app store process (weird rejections that had to be explained etc), I don't see Android as an alternative to iOS appstore for startups. Once the iOS app is up running, we develop the android (and since we believe android users are used to seeing incomplete apps), we take our time adding functions to the app as well! (Yes I know, it is a cynical view, but we simply match expectation)
dangerboysteve 13y ago
Check back in 1-2 years and see how much publishing to Play is any easier than Apple's App store. Google is adopting the Apple playbook more and more every day to ensure quality, security and consistency in the android ecosystem. The only difference is that Apple has had a head start by a few years and they have gone through the growing pains and issues that Google's play is starting to encounter.
chetanahuja 13y ago
Lots of "Android apps are no good" chiming in going on here. I've been an iOS user since the week after the first iPhone came out and still am (due to an iPad mini). But gave up on iOS for my phone because I can't find the following apps on iOS. 1) Alternate Launcher with pretty much infinite flexibility on look and feel. 2) Swype like keyboard options. Typing anything on iOS now feels like I travelled back in time to horse-and-buggy era. 3) Tasker app. Enough said. 4) Google Now. Enough said. 5) This is not an app per se, but the "share with" option for pictures etc that simply let me chose any suitable app on the phone that lets me share that particular object using pretty much any means of sharing out there. And this is not even counting all the hacker'y goodness of having a full root shell with an almost complete debian environment on my Nexus devices. No "jailbreak" required. Nexus devices are rootable by design. If you call yourself a hacker (this is hacker news... right?) and have turned your nose up at Android so far, you're simply missing out on the future of portable devices. iOS is catered to non-technical consumers and its feature-set (both for users as well as for developers) is accordingly restricted. The future killer apps are being written for Android today and you're not aware of what a mobile device is (and should be) capable of today and by extension, tomorrow. [Edit: 1, 2 and 3 in that list above are paid apps btw. Checkout out the install numbers for those three on the play-store. Android developers writing stuff for Android (and not just copying stale iOS material) are making plenty of money]
- bad_user 13y ago
  Android is awesome for the way it lets apps interoperate. The "share with" functionality is just one example and it's not just for photos either. For example if you have Readability installed, you can "share" the article to Readability from within both Chrome and Firefox (speaking of which, Firefox isn't available on iOS because Apple doesn't allow it). I would like to add to your list the ability to completely block phone calls and SMS messages from annoying numbers, with no traces left in the phone's logs. Or the ability to automate your phone settings, depending on time or location, like turning the data off at 11 p.m. for battery preservation or turning silent while you're at work. I don't know if such apps are still banned on iTunes, but it's what made me switch from an iPhone 3GS to a Galaxy S.
  - 13y ago
EliPenwell 13y ago
just as Leslie replied I didnt know that any one can make $6590 in 4 weeks on the computer. her explanation www.DROp80.com
wizzard 13y ago
Sure, the release process might be easier on Android, but there are other factors involved in app development. Android is becoming a kind of curse word at my current job. Getting a working emulator can be a huge exercise in frustration (like for gMaps v2... forget it). Every and any feature or UI widget can break in unexpected ways on different devices. The tools are very functional but about as unintuitive and finicky as you can get. And I can tell you the documentation is not shorter because it's better. I have nothing personal against Android, but let's not just skim over the actual DEVELOPMENT process.
- general_failure 13y ago
  Sorry but it sounds like you are a android noob
  - wizzard 13y ago
    Sorry, but it sounds like you are a troll. I'd be happy to give details if you don't know (or don't care to see) what I'm talking about. But based on the upvotes to my comment and very similar complaints in other comments to this article, many people agree with me.
zmmmmm 13y ago
A lot of people seem to be missing the main point here. I don't think the article is actually advocating developing for Android and NOT iOS. I don't think it is even particularly advocating releasing on Android first. However starting your development on Android - as your first way of prototyping and finding your MVP - gives you a tremendous amount of agility and flexibility. You can create as many APKs as you want, send them to whoever you want without any fuss and they can test them out. You can fix bugs or implement features for just one person and send them the APK the same day. You can integrate your app with the OS and other apps in ways that are impossible on iOS to find what really works and matters to your users. And you can do all this for virtually zero cost on commodity hardware with free tools. In other words, even if you believe iOS is ultimately going to be your primary platform, there's still a strong argument to do your initial prototyping and development on Android.
- engrenage 13y ago
  There are more Android apps than iOS apps, and this advantage has always been present. So, why aren't Android apps already of superior quality?
  - zmmmmm 13y ago
    Well, so many reasons ... until 4.0 the whole framework was ugly and the tools were very immature compared to where they are now. Few developers, especially ones who care about design, had much or any experience building apps for Android. A lot of early Android developers were either people with no experience at all or iOS developers who tried to apply iOS principles to Android development and failed hard. And it's possible the Android user base in general cared less about design so that in itself was not such a high priority (perhaps this is not so true now). But aside from all that, this discussion is not really about quality per se. It is about figuring out your business idea, getting it right. Whether you then go and execute it well after that point is a different point.
    - engrenage 13y ago
      > But aside from all that, this discussion is not really about quality per se. It is about figuring out your business idea, getting it right. But surely the same logic applies to this too. Why haven't we already seen all kinds of innovative business ideas emerging through the rapid iteration that Android supposedly enables?
brennenHN 13y ago
I love the point about iteration here, but I think this post is a little bit disingenuous. The problem with developing for Android as a startup is that baseline reliability is incredibly resource intensive. If you want your app to work on the most popular few devices, you will still have to spend a considerable amount of time and money testing the different configurations and fixing bugs that have nothing to do with your core functionality. If you want broad support to address most of the market, you're going to be spending a huge amount of development time tweaking little details of your code. When you fix a bug for the Galaxy S4, it'll start crashing on the HTC One X, and the Galaxy Note will never look quite right. Iteration is valuable, but iOS lets you build one product and iterate on it, to build for Android, you have to start by building 15.
- general_failure 13y ago
  There we go with this fragmentation bullshit. Say something concrete. BTW I had the same problem - what works on iPad 3 didn't work on iPhone 4 and I fixes something that didn't work on touch.
- jordanthoms 13y ago
  Any specifics on that? Unless you are doing something really weird, there shouldn't be compatibility issues between recent devices like that. Generally the issues are with older devices that have very little ram etc, which are becoming less and less common.
Mikeb85 13y ago
There are plenty of apps (including games) on the Play store with 100,000+ purchases (not just free installs), and I know of at least a few that cost $3+ with 500,000 to 1,000,000 purchases, and Minecraft has 1-5 million puchases at ($6,99? - forgot). This means that the possibility to make 6-7 figures on Android apps is there, if your app is compelling enough. The problem isn't getting users to pay, but making an app compelling enough that users want to pay for it.
so898 13y ago
So every startup group should buy 300+ Android devices to test their application?
bobbles 13y ago
Things that annoy me about buying android apps since I switched to a nexus 4 this week: No way to in-app upgrade to remove ads. what?? (you have to buy a separate app). Heaps of games / apps that dont even provide an option to remove the ads. I feel like a lot of android developers are going to miss out on people moving from iOS to android now that the OS has matured and has improved a lot of the areas that iOS users were worried about. These are people willing to whip out the card and pay because they're accustomed to it on iOS. If there is no way for me to remove ads from an app I am more likely to uninstall it then use it with ads.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
zerny 13y ago
Android sucks
t1m 13y ago
>1990 is calling… and it wants its product development cycle back. In the early 1990s, many developers were using an OS called Unix, with esoteric tools like vi, make, sh, and emacs. They wrote software in ancient languages like C, C++, Python, and Objective-C. Their programs communicated over TCP/IP networks using sockets. If you were lucky enough to be working on a military contract, you would be exchanging documents using XML and HTML papa SGML. Everyone suffered until the major breakthroughs of Javascript and PHP.
- general_failure 13y ago
  Huh? It was windows basically and iteration was depending on the App author.
  - t1m 13y ago
    In 1990 microsoftland, most people were still using DOS. Borland had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C products on the market for a number of years - vt100 style text menuing systems were still king in MS-DOS. Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, which was the real starting adoption point for the majority of the market. By that time, the NeXT computer had already been out for four years, the Mac and X Windows were eight. I was actually just pointing out that software development, as a discipline hasn't advanced that much since 1990. The number of KLOCs freely available to use within your code has increased dramatically. The documentation (which was on paper pre-WWW) has improved exponentially. The tools, OSes and languages? Pretty much a plateau there since the mid 80s peak.
    - general_failure 13y ago
      OK, you win. But you completely missed the point of 1990 in that post (hint: he meant windows)
jmtame 13y ago
Three words: high fidelity prototypes. You can use them irregardless of the process to distribute your application. You should already have customer feedback on your app before you even commit engineering resources to write production quality code, and there's no excuse not to be prototyping and getting customer feedback far before you release it to the app store for the masses.
eonil 13y ago
Wrong. Completely wrong. Stop trying this stupid wording fraud. What the hell the Android means? The users? Or the cartel? Android users are never starving for beautiful apps. The Android cartel does. Android users always starving for free stuffs, not beautiful. What kind of idiot choose Android for beautiful apps instead of iOS which is already-existing and also proven? Android has no beautiful apps because the users don't want it. Market share? Market share itself doesn't make money. Especially blind market is purely useless. This article is just a mutated clone of crappy meme: "Say market share, and never say how the market share will make money.". Even Google and telecoms are making more money on iOS. Android is pretty attractive toy for a developer. But for business? No kidding.
habosa 13y ago
The speed of pushing to the Play Store can't be overrated for startups. If you release an app that has a critical bug this is what happens: iOS: Fix it, wait days-weeks for approval, push the update Android: Fix it, wait 30 seconds, update pushed to everyone If the bug is big enough, this can be the difference between losing all of your initial users and gaining critical mass.
shinratdr 13y ago
What makes it good for startups also makes it good for malware, spam apps, information harvesting and other user unfriendly things. I'm not arguing against this post, it's true in the sense that it is indisputably easier to iterate on Android vs iOS because of the lack of a review system. But as someone with both Android and iOS devices that they enjoy, it's very easy to see which one is a more user-friendly approach. Having a broken app or two for a week is a small price to pay for trust. I don't trust the Play Store, I check out each individual app before downloading. On iOS because of the more robust review & permissions model, I can trust that while what I download might not be good, it will in all likelihood be safe. In addition, I feel like evangelizing to developers like this is pointless. Besides the minority of personal developers driven primarily by morals, their preferred platform or preferred tools, developers go where the users are and the money is. If "Android is for startups" then that should be the case, and a blog post isn't going to make it so. The presence of startups iterating on Android initially makes it so, and that is driven by users + money.
frozenport 13y ago
Android is for judicious, poor foreigners and not the hip kids that would pay 4x for a carwash ordered by phone. I recal the pruce gauging by travel companies who increase airfair by 10% when an Apple brpwser was detected.
moubarak 13y ago
i don't have much to say, but i develop camera apps and i also started with Android and then moved to iOS. The transition was swift because of iOS's screen sizes/resolutions were well defined and straight forward, no fragmentation manager was required to handle different screens. Although i was using a single device for Android, i couldn't help but write a generic manager to handle different screens rather than hardcode my prototype to a single device. On the other hand, iOS screen and camera previews are hardcoded by design, and that saved me a lot of time. Android being open source helped quite a bit, since i could borrow all that code from the stock camera app, but it was tedious to say the least. When i transitioned to iOS i was surprised how fast i got my basic camera app to work (few hours perhaps). There are other reasons why i find iOS to be superior for prototyping (i have only touched on the camera preview issue). One other example is the relative documentation. iOS documentation gets you going much faster when working with the camera at least. Just my 2 cents.
golergka 13y ago
> release cycle of the App Store encourages the perfectionist in all of us to make it “done” Isn't that exactly the reason for Apple's policies?
aufreak3 13y ago
> Besides, have you tried Android recently? You might be suprised to discover that Android is better. .. not yet for music apps. Even Google folks admit that [1]. This really can't wait any longer. Where is Garage Band for Android please? ... and to those saying "you can't complain only about music, look at the games, todo lists, blah blah", sorry music IS my domain and that's the only thing I care about. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c
mentat 13y ago
Since this is still floating around /best, I highly recommend http://hockeyapp.net/ http://hockeyapp.net/ SoundFocus is using it for their betas and it "just works" for distribution and updating. Feels like the app store too.

514 points by willwhitney 13y ago

mynd 13y ago

I think a little barrier to entry is a good thing. App Store is saturated as it is.

leokun 13y ago
Right because who wouldn't want more choice? Those that got there first must obviously be better.
delinka 13y ago
But the only barrier is the $99 fee for the dev account. Register as an individual and it's "instant access." And that's why the App Store is saturated. They set up the barriers the moment you want to register a company. Presumably so that you can't pretend to be representing someone else's company.

samspenc 13y ago

Excellent write-up. As a mobile developer, this was my experience publishing Android apps to Play store as well. Also, my theory is that once there are enough quality apps on Android, we will start to see the center of popularity shift to Android from iOS.

grosen 13y ago

Free apps do well on Android. Paid apps (Outright & Free + In App Purchases) generate more revenue on iOS. Being able to show traction is important for startups but, being able to show increased revenue is equally if not more important. Until Android on a whole proves to be more lucrative to monetize apps, many developers will continue building iOS first (imho).

ajross 13y ago
Your statement is true, but sort of missing the point of the article. Sure, "many" developers "will" wait "until" Android "proves" better. But some won't, and there is value in being part of the early ones to jump. The article is advocating jumping now and gives some arguments (not all of them convincing IMHO) as to why that's a good idea. You're just saying that not everyone will take the advice. Well, yeah. :)
- grosen 13y ago
  Android might never prove better. When/if it ever does then I will reevaluate and deal with being a fast follower rather than a first mover. However, it is premature at this stage to state that Android is the better platform for startups.

discostrings 13y ago

Being in the process of registering my LLC for an iOS Apple Developer account, I couldn't agree more. It's been over two months now of back-and-forth with Apple and Dun & Bradstreet, and the end is still not in sight. All I'd like them to do is take my $100 and give me the ability to test the free app I'm making on a device and then publish it, but apparently Apple feels a longer-than-two-month turnaround time is acceptable. (And yes, I know I could just register a personal account and then slowly convert it to an LLC account. I shouldn't have to do that. As someone who's somewhat interested in their platform but not dying to develop for it, I'm not going to do that.)

mattmanser 13y ago
Bit of a strange thing to say. Yes, I could solve it easily, but I'm not going to do that.
- discostrings 13y ago
  It's not really a solution--it's a hack to get around their horrible process. I want to correctly publish what belongs to and was created by the LLC under the name of the LLC, not my own name.
  - fspeech 13y ago
    Yes. What you are doing makes sense from a legal liability point of view, which is why you would set up a LLC in the first place.
eurleif 13y ago
I started off with a sole proprietor account, and then converted it to an LLC. It was "pending" for months. During that time, my Apple developer registration expired, and I renewed it... but because I renewed it for the LLC, not the sole proprietorship, and the LLC was "pending", my account expired anyway, and my app was removed from the store. Thanks, Apple.
killahpriest 13y ago

avolcano 13y ago

> But if you build an app on Android that’s on par with the design quality you’re used to on iOS, your users will love you. The press will love you. Gizmodo will feature your app just so they’ll have a nice header image for their “Android Apps of the Week” post. That's nice, but will it translate into sales? Probably not, given the horror stories of Android piracy that seem to come out every few weeks (particularly in the gaming market). Of course, many startups profit in hype instead of dollars, so maybe that's irrelevant.

opendomain 13y ago
Android Apss are easier to deploy, but becuase of that, you get bad code - or WORSE - viruses! There are several Andoid apps that are Malware - there is not one in Apple App store.
- watty 13y ago
  So you're saying that Android should make it more difficult to deploy to decrease malware and bad code? Come on, stop drinking the kool aid.
  - drp4929 13y ago
    Trick is to find a balance in the process so that author of an App is legally identifiable. This is to avoid episodes like "Fake Angry Bird App" and "Fake Mobile Banking App". IMO, when I download ETrade App on my smartphone, it is good to know that someone checked that it was submitted by someone who is from ETrade really. If the process is rigorous for E*Trade, so be it. But as an end user I'd prefer it to be that way instead of making it _my_ responsible to verify before installing the app.
    - fpgeek 13y ago
      Note that this is a problem both stores share: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/08/how-app-store-grifters-clone-an-overnight-success-to-make-a-quick-buck/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/08/how-app-store-grifters-... From what I understand, absent a legal judgment Apple doesn't do much to police copycats, misleading names and the like.

robbfitzsimmons 13y ago

As a primarily-iOS user / developer who also has an Android tablet (last year's Nexus 7), completely agree with both points made here. [The first being that Android development is better, and the second being that the vast majority Android apps currently suck compared to the iOS equivalent, making for a nice opportunity.] It's hard enough to peg a real user need and deliver on that need in a satisfying, sticky way. It's at the core of what a startup needs to do to cultivate that product development discipline as a team, and tools that make that harder are insult to injury. As others have mentioned, though, none of these app startups are launching just for a smooth development experience. And Android just hasn't shown that users will reliably upgrade their OS, much less pay for apps like iOS users do. Until that changes, even if the better dev experience will accelerate a shift, it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem on app quality.

bane 13y ago
> making for a nice opportunity One tricky thing is that even if your app is really nicely crafted, it might be hard for users to find it without lots of out-of-play-store promotion.
jcromartie 13y ago
> making for a nice opportunity You are assuming that there is demand for anything but free apps. I know that I personally would kill to pay for top-quality Android apps like I do on iOS, but I don't think I speak for the majority of Android users. Based on everything that I've seen, they just don't want to pay.
- GVIrish 13y ago
  Industry numbers I've seen suggest that this is changing rapidly. I think what we're seeing is that Android is attracting a lot more high end smartphone customers and they are buying more apps. The gap is still big, but it is shrinking rapidly.
- robbfitzsimmons 13y ago
  Completely agreed (and would also kill to pay); what I meant at the end of my comment that it's that it's a nice opportunity predicated on being a quality app right when the market starts to shift. Which I think is what Will's betting on.

luscious 13y ago

Does this article need to exist? Who is this preaching to?

zerop 13y ago

Yes.. developers might prefer android over iOS.. but end of the day iOS apps get you business..IMO...tell me which android apps sell better than their counterpart iOS apps?

willwhitney 13y ago
Pocket Casts actually wrote a great blog post about this: http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2013/02/20/why-android-first/ http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2013/02/20/why-android-first/ Because some niches are really poorly covered on Android, apps that fill those may have greater success than they would on iOS.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Is niche-filling in the shadow of a large corporation (Google) really a sustainable way to run a business? Software-savvy giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon pretty much don't care about stomping on your little niche (esp. if it's due to a deficiency in the platform/system) if it helps them one-up their competitor.

badman_ting 13y ago

This is such a weird piece. It seems to get why, despite the onerous restrictions Apple puts on devs, iOS has great apps and huge numbers in every direction, but then just says Android is better. Perhaps a better argument would be to understand why the gain is worth the pain, and then move to saying that the gain without the pain would be even sweeter. I dunno, I make web stuff. I just like watching you guys duke it out.

mooreds 13y ago
What I took from the piece is that Android is far more developer friendly in terms of ease of development, deployment to devices for testing, and releasing. Whether that is enough to make it a 'better' platform depends on what your needs are. If I were doing a mobile startup and needed fast feedback on devices, Android's fast turnaround sure would be interesting. Not the deciding factor, but definitely a check in the Android column.

antidaily 13y ago

_______________ is broken.

jcromartie 13y ago

I know that Android users are starved for slick apps that look good and work well, because I'm one of them (when using my Nexus 7). But as a developer I know that I can't make money from them. There is no way forward for (paid) Android apps that can make a living. You need to sell on iOS in order to make any sort of revenue. So if your startup is built on a free app, then by all means use Android to test your idea. But if you want to make things and sell them for money, then putting up with the App Store model is more than worth the amount of money you can make compared to Android.

KirinDave 13y ago
> I know that Android users are starved for slick apps that look good and work well, because I'm one of them (when using my Nexus 7). But as a developer I know that I can't make money from them. > There is no way forward for (paid) Android apps that can make a living. Why do you say this? I concede it may be true for games, but games are actually one of the hardest places to make a living. Make not-game apps and your expectation of payment and your likelihood of piracy plummet.
- jcromartie 13y ago
  Maybe it is just for games, but that's the segment I pay the most attention to. I'd love to be proven wrong through experience, so maybe I'll throw some Android apps out there.
  - KirinDave 13y ago
    Personally, I know 3 people who make a living doing productivity and utility apps on Android now. I've actually never personally met an indy iOS developer making their money on not-games, come to think of it. I easily spend $15-30/mo on android apps. I go out of my way to buy ad-less versions but I do appreciate that I can try an app for a few days even with an ugly, unfit ad.
slantyyz 13y ago
>> There is no way forward for (paid) Android apps that can make a living. You need to sell on iOS in order to make any sort of revenue. Yes, that is kind of sad. As someone who does pay for Android software, I imagine I'm in the minority. I've got extended family members who balk at the notion of paying even a dollar for software on Android. OTOH, I'm curious how many paid apps on the iOS App store actually hit the break-even point.

venomsnake 13y ago

Now ... we tried to register apple dev account in late 2010 for my company. The first thing they required was a lot of documents. We send them. Then came the payment ... they refused to accept our credit card and refused non credit card payment methods. The email we got back from apple was a exercise in absurdity - (this was 2012 already after a lot of back and forth) - they wanted the details of the company credit card send to them BY FAX. In 2012 they wanted for us to send the full details of a credit card written on paper. By fax. So we told them to fuck off. Triple checked - it was not scam or phishing letter. Then we made a simple single developer account ... personal. It took only a month.

lukabratos 13y ago

"Knock, knock." "Who’s there?" "Very long pause…." "Java."

babebridou 13y ago
"2 weeks later..." "[NSString stringWithFormat: @"%@ who?", result];"
- ipodize 13y ago
  8 months later: "ArithmeticException - joke doesn't add up"
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    10 months later "random crashes due to pointer misuse".

PStamatiou 13y ago

Great post -- As a newly diehard Android user, I will agree that while Android is definitely getting some amazing and beautiful apps, it's nothing like on the App Store. If you spend the time to design a beautiful app, there is a larger opportunity for you to unseat very popular Android apps. Android users crave great design too. Start building. http://paulstamatiou.com/android-is-better http://paulstamatiou.com/android-is-better

gte910h 13y ago

I'm a 3rd party iOS developer: If you want to make money by directly selling something, or need people who constantly use your app => iOS still seems to have higher engagement and higher revenue. If you want to make money by having a thing you're giving away to tons of people who need to only use your app briefly, android MIGHT be the case for tomorrow and for certain communities, today. That said, "Android" isn't a monolith. I think Google did a tremendously good thing by incorporating so many new services into the Play Store rather than into the almost-never-updated core OS, and you should be looking at targeting THAT, not years old versions of Android, to get an updated, easy to maintain android target you do aside an iOS target. People will complain, but will also get new phones that have the Google play store with modern services. With both versions, it's always really important to measure cost per user on a version by version, platform by platform basis.

ensmotko 13y ago

Another thing that bothers me with development for iOS is that you need apple hardware and software. I can't develop an iOS on my Linux machine (I've tried running OSX in virtualbox, but it's slow and not to mention illegal). I really wish Apple would make their platform a little more available. Lowering the $100 yearly fee would be a good start...

jbjohns 13y ago
If you can't even afford $100 a year you probably can afford anything you would need to develop for the platform (e.g. a mac).
- ensmotko 13y ago
  If $100 a year would allow me to develop iOS apps on my Linux laptop I'd be fine with that. But $100 a year + paying for overpriced apple hardware doesn't sound appealing.
  - xutopia 13y ago
    And that is where the line divides. Android users are like you... they don't want to pay for software and go for cheaper hardware when they can.
    - BlackDeath3 13y ago
      To speak nothing of whether or not that is actually true, what is the problem with opting for cheaper hardware?
    - kintamanimatt 13y ago
      I'm a Linux and Android user. My Android phone wasn't any cheaper than an iPhone and I can most certainly afford any Apple hardware I want. I also don't use Linux because I'm cheap, I use Linux because I love it. The hardware was exactly what I wanted too. I don't develop for iOS because I don't want to own a Mac. I (as a long-time Linux user) find OS X incredibly frustrating. There's also absolutely no reason to force developers to use a particular brand of hardware or a particular operating system to develop for a particular phone.

leemhoffman 13y ago

The IOS Development process is outdated and kind of crappy, but there are simple tacitly accepted solutions that fix virtually all of the issues. Specifically: - Hockey App For Pre Public Distribution - Auto Updates, One Click Link Install (no need to join a google group) - Enterprise account - no device ids, send the link to anyone The dev cycle on mobile is slower, and more waterfall, but there is no excuse to not be iterating on anything more than 3-5 day cycles on either android or IOS.

shmerl 13y ago

I'd say Sailfish is for startups.

trimbo 13y ago

VCs all have iPhones. This is the #1 reason to develop for iPhone first.

gonzo 13y ago
VCs all have iPhones because the majority of people who are willing to pay for a phone or apps prefer iOS. it's really that simple.
chimeracoder 13y ago
> VCs all have iPhones. Fred Wilson would beg to differ (at least until a few weeks ago, and even then, his reasons for switching are not what you might think). Seriously, no (good) VC is going to decline to invest just because you're Android-first instead of iOS-first, if that's a decision that actually makes sense for your target market.
general_failure 13y ago
So how many VCs have you profiled to come to this conclusion?

andrewcamel 13y ago

If you're alright ignoring the far more profitable iOS market, then sure, Android is better. But if you're trying to operate a startup that actually needs to make money, it is not a smart business decision to ignore it. Complain as much as you want, but iOS still provides a better opportunity than Android in the very large majority of cases and because of that, I'm ok dealing with the headaches that come with it.

andrewcamel 13y ago

benihana 13y ago

Another post on the top of Hacker News making the mistake of thinking paying customers give a crap about how easy it is to [write|deploy|test|debug] your app. Even with all the pain associated with the App Store people still write more apps for it than ever. Why? Cause people pay for apps there. They don't on the Play Store.

myko 13y ago
> Why? Cause people pay for apps there. They don't on the Play Store. Is this based on your opinion, or what?
- rpedela 13y ago
  There is some research that backs up the claim. http://www.idigitaltimes.com/articles/17985/20130531/ios-app-sales-vs-android-apples-itunes.htm http://www.idigitaltimes.com/articles/17985/20130531/ios-app...
- calbear81 13y ago
  There's some evidence of that here: http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-index-market-q2-2013/ http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-index-market-q2-2013/ People on iOS are more willing to buy apps and do more in-app purchases but the gap doesn't seem that wide to bridge, especially as iOS users move to Android.
  - winslow 13y ago
    I think a lot of that comes from the iTunes gift cards that everybody seems to get for Christmas, Birthdays, etc. I purchased my first app with "real" money a month or two ago for android.
    - vmarsy 13y ago
      Even if it's true, I don't think developers care if the money they got at the end of the month comes from a gift card or a credit card. Google Play gift cards exist too, I don't know if you can buy music with it though, if not it's logic that iTunes cards sells better.

namenotrequired 13y ago

As Paul Graham said... http://paulgraham.com/apple.html http://paulgraham.com/apple.html

nathan_long 13y ago

Semi-related rant: My sole experience with Apple Developer stuff was being forced to register as one to get some basic command-line tools on my Mac. They made me complete a questionnaire about exactly which kinds of Apple products I wanted to develop for, and "none" wasn't an option. That's kind of a weird, Apple-centric worldview. "Errrm, I'm doing web development..."

engrenage 13y ago
You don't need to register as a developer to get the command line tools.
- rsynnott 13y ago
  Some of the Java development tools (JNI-related stuff), oddly, used to require (free) registration. Don't think they do any more, though.

umsm 13y ago

I don't agree with this. Basically the author thinks that you can test the market if a particular idea / app is worth making by releasing on Android first. The problem is that the android users will most likely hate the UI and the bugs as it will probably be thrown together. When releasing an app on iOS, you don't have to include ALL features, you can release an app that is well designed and functions well with limited functionality. Then add features as you need to. That's what we did when we released our app. We released for iOS first and then for android, but we gradually added features as needed or wanted.

ajross 13y ago
I'm not following your arguments at all. Android apps must inherently be buggy and "thrown together"? Android apps must "include ALL features" before release?
- umsm 13y ago
  From what I understood from the article: - You can iterate quickly on android. If you notice that people don't care for your app, you can stop at the splash screen I assume. Or stop when you've added enough features that and yet no one is downloading. - When you release on android, it's almost instant. This means that you don't test it as well as you should because you know you can always patch it tomorrow.
jamesjguthrie 13y ago
> you don't have to include ALL features You sure do have to include a lot of features though. You've no chance if your app is a simple one because you'll get hit with one of these: 2.12: Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected
- umsm 13y ago
  I believe you are referring to the app store guidelines. The article mentions the android market place.

dasil003 13y ago

This seems like really forced wishful thinking. Sure Apple makes you jump through a lot of annoying hoops, but it doesn't matter how cynical you are you can't hand-wave away the security benefits, and you certainly can't ignore the revenue differentials. I think Android is moving in the right direction, and actually I've used it as my primary phone for years now (I've owned 2 Nexus phones and the old G1), but waiting 5 days for approval (which is the average I've experienced for 6 submissions over the last 2 months) is not as big of a hurdle as the article paints. There's certainly nothing that requires waterfall development or "waiting months".

x0054 13y ago

I think the difference in development comes in when you need to do some hardware testing. With apple you need to design for 3 different display sizes, with 2 resolutions each. You also have to test your product on (at most) 12 different devices, and that's if you really want to cover the field. On the other hand, with Android, if you want to do it right, you need to design for hundreds of different screen sizes, all kinds of different aspect ratios and resolutions, and hundreds of different hardware devices. Or you can forgo all that, and just assume (incorrectly) that majority of the Android users run the latest and greatest Galaxy hardware.

dlhavema 13y ago
there was an article posted here a few weeks ago that talked about an android development company/group that boiled it down to ~10 major categories of devices that they needed to test with to get maximum device acceptance. So for them, unless a whole category of device comes out, like a smart watch for example, they do not need to have every device to test. and this encompassed screen sizes and OS versions.
- prehkugler 13y ago
  > So for them, unless a whole category of device comes out, like a smart watch for example, they do not need to have every device to test. Cue the Samsung Galaxy Gear.
- richardwhiuk 13y ago
  You can test on a limited range, but you will hit handset specific bugs - its just a fact of life on Android.
KirinDave 13y ago
You can shave away a LOT of form factors if you just agree to cut off development before Android 4.0. This is tough for people to resolve to do, but in the US that's 60% of the market. I'd rather ship a good product to 60% of the people in a reasonable amount of time, rather than spending a ton of time working on tiny slices of the last 40% and limiting what the product can do overall. You also end up targeting much newer devices and OS versions, which evades a lot of problems with piracy.

rjvir 13y ago

While the 5-10 day approval process to get the App Store is inconvenient for developers, it gets a disproportionate amount of attention. The limiting factor in software development is and will remain to be engineering resources. Building on the Apple ecosystem still takes considerably less time and effort to complete an app than Android, due to consistent and up-to-date hardware & software, common design patterns, a robust developer ecosystem, and generally a more sophisticated development platform.

prehkugler 13y ago
As a mobile developer who has worked on both platforms, I agree wholeheartedly with this. Xcode and Interface Builder is much easier to use than Eclipse (I found myself constantly editing the raw XML interface files). And I find the UIKit API much simpler to use (for most cases) than Android's Activity-based SDK.
- Rezo 13y ago
  IntelliJ or the upcoming Android Studio (based on IntelliJ), which will eventually replace Eclipse as the recommended IDE, makes Android development much more pleasant. Give it a try.

alayne 13y ago

Why don't they build a web app if they want to iterate faster?

veeti 13y ago
Because they suck ass.
rimantas 13y ago
The only thing web app can make you achieve faster is to reach end user. Anything else will be so much faster using native SDK it is not even funny (assuming you have equal knowledge of either technology).
- zwrose 13y ago
  Sure, but isn't that the key of Lean Startup, which is what OP was hammering on anyway? Web apps do perform less optimally, but they are also platform independent and can be done quickly. Why not start there, make sure you are hitting the right user needs, then invest in app development?

tomasien 13y ago

It's perfectly fine to argue the merits of Android development, but arguing that it's hard to run an app on your own device using XCode is dishonest. It handles provisioning profiles automatically, and you can even hit "fix it" if it doesn't find a valid one when you try to run it. I've been building an app for Android for 2 weeks now, and I still can't get the phone settings on an Android phone to use it for development. This may be MY problem because I'm a terrible developer, but it's still a problem.

krschultz 13y ago
"Note: On Android 4.2 and newer, Developer options is hidden by default. To make it available, go to Settings > About phone and tap Build number seven times. Return to the previous screen to find Developer options." http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html http://developer.android.com/tools/device.html
- tomasien 13y ago
  I know man, still not working. No idea why, probably just something I'm missing because Eclipse is ugly and difficult as sin.
  - josteink 13y ago
    Dump Eclipse. No really. New Android studio based on JetBrains' IntelliJ is so much better it makes me wonder how I would ever endure using Eclipse for anything. Try it. It'll take you less than 5 minutes from download to having your hello world on device, in debugging mode. It'll be the single best thing you did all day.

joshstrange 13y ago

Have you ever tried TestFlight for iOS testing/dev? I'm not saying the Apple process is perfect (I agree it sucks) but TestFlight makes getting test builds out much easier.

9999 13y ago

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.

spot 13y ago
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.
- 9999 13y ago
  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.
jordanthoms 13y ago
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?
dycow 13y ago
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).

anigbrowl 13y ago

Design is an easy win on Android, but it's the suck for any kind of audio processing because of the horrendous lag. Like MS before them, Google completely ignored the needs/requests of musicians for years on end, and as a result all the good apps are for iPad. The only two Android audio apps I can think of that are worth looking at are Caustic and FruityLoops, and neither is particularly performance-friendly. I was using a remote control MIDI app for a while called Humatic but the developer said device fragmentation was such a miserable experience that he never wants to develop on Android again. I've been using Android since Google put out the Nexus One, and I still prefer it for a phone. But for a tablet I have to unwillingly go with an iPad next time, because that's where the good stuff is.

liyanage 13y ago

Having to make sure that everything is perfect before you ship As a user, that sounds pretty good to me...

scrrr 13y ago

Sorry, but this is not a good article. Instead of telling me what to do based on a small dataset of evidence, I'd much rather read what you have done. What worked for you. I don't think the author knows what he is talking about.

Apocryphon 13y ago

This is the most tiresome religious war. While it's interesting to compare and contrast development experiences between Android and iOS, this comment thread seems mostly a lot of outrage between partisans of both platforms. Which makes me wonder where devs who use PhoneGap and other bridge frameworks, or HTML5, feel about all of this.

domness 13y ago

Hmm, I think a lot of people are missing the whole point in this article. I do around 60% Ruby on Rails, 35% iOS and 5% Android dev. The idea around a "lean" startup being, that an MVP, or each new feature, or even testing a change to a previous feature is usually done in quick succession. This being testing with current users over a period of say, a week, and then from the results, changes can be made and the team have learned from the testing. So really, Android allows for this quick succession of testing features and iterating as quick as possible, with even to a few hours turnaround. Also, that it would cost a lot in development time to get something "just right" for the App Store for it to be accepted, whereas with Android you can keep on iterating and pushing changes without having to spent a huge amount of time making everything look perfect, and be absolute minimal in terms of bugs. I love iOS development, and yes, I agree with most people on here about the revenue from iOS, the people paying for apps, Apple's process of helping keep out most malware etc. etc., but for the sake of a "lean" startup, spending extra weeks testing apps making sure it's completely bug free and "looking good enough" for iOS, as well as the wait for Apple to accept the application (and then for users to download the update, in the case of iOS 7, this has been solved), Android is a much better dev option for these changes. Of course, when the team knows that the app is something that people care for, and they have a decent knowledge of what users want, what features they use, and the kind of value that the mobile app brings to them, then they can go ahead and make the best possible iOS app. TL;DR Saving time, money and quick iterations, learning from customers and getting quick data for problem validation, is much easier and faster on Android, than the process on iOS. Think Lean Startup.

ryandrake 13y ago
As a mobile app user, I don't want daily updates from your app as you "iterate" away and try to figure out what to build. I want to download the finished product that works. I'm not your free beta testing service. If you want to test concepts, do proper market research.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- domness 13y ago

grbalaffa 13y ago

All this talk about process, but not a word about the quality of the SDK itself. Android is quite frankly still very far behind when it comes to really basic things. Here's just one example: iOS has had easy support for custom fonts in native UI elements since the early days, meanwhile here is the situation on Android: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2973270/using-a-custom-typeface-in-android http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2973270/using-a-custom-ty... (Yes, the thread was started in 2010, but scroll to the bottom to see more recent comments -- things have scarcely gotten any better.) Anyone who has actually deployed a non-trivial app on both Android and iOS knows quite well which one is the "better" development environment.

akmiller 13y ago
This is anecdotal (but frankly so is yours)... We have mainly been doing iOS apps but we are hearing demand from customers about having an option in Android so one of our developers (who is definitely much more of an Apple fan) has been experimenting with the Android SDK and he has been very impressed with the Android SDK. He has found many things to be far easier in the Android SDK than with iOS. His main complaint is with the emulator which is extremely frustrating to use but since it's dead easy to use your device that's not as big of a deal.
- grbalaffa 13y ago
  At least I gave an example. "Many things" are not just easier, but "far" easier? Like what? I've got plenty more examples, but I'd really like to hear about these "many" things which are "far" easier than in iOS.

franklee0987 13y ago

I cant believe I just bought an awesome silver Nissan 370Z Coupe from only workin parttime on a computer… get redirected here big57.com

chj 13y ago

The artificial limitations around iOS are contrary to what developers should believe in -- the freedom to write and distribute software on a platform without approval from some central authority. Despite the fact that iOS has much better design and comes with much better developer tools, Android is nowadays the better choice.

markshepard 13y ago

Interestingly the opposite is true in our case. We are a small startup that has apps available both in Apple and Android. But because it is hard to develop and deploy a successful app in iOS than in android, it keeps competition at bay. In Android, lot of half baked apps pollute the store (and the fake ratings and review destroy any sort of app discovery) that it is simply not worth it. While we have had our share of frusturation with the apple app store process (weird rejections that had to be explained etc), I don't see Android as an alternative to iOS appstore for startups. Once the iOS app is up running, we develop the android (and since we believe android users are used to seeing incomplete apps), we take our time adding functions to the app as well! (Yes I know, it is a cynical view, but we simply match expectation)

dangerboysteve 13y ago

Check back in 1-2 years and see how much publishing to Play is any easier than Apple's App store. Google is adopting the Apple playbook more and more every day to ensure quality, security and consistency in the android ecosystem. The only difference is that Apple has had a head start by a few years and they have gone through the growing pains and issues that Google's play is starting to encounter.

chetanahuja 13y ago

Lots of "Android apps are no good" chiming in going on here. I've been an iOS user since the week after the first iPhone came out and still am (due to an iPad mini). But gave up on iOS for my phone because I can't find the following apps on iOS. 1) Alternate Launcher with pretty much infinite flexibility on look and feel. 2) Swype like keyboard options. Typing anything on iOS now feels like I travelled back in time to horse-and-buggy era. 3) Tasker app. Enough said. 4) Google Now. Enough said. 5) This is not an app per se, but the "share with" option for pictures etc that simply let me chose any suitable app on the phone that lets me share that particular object using pretty much any means of sharing out there. And this is not even counting all the hacker'y goodness of having a full root shell with an almost complete debian environment on my Nexus devices. No "jailbreak" required. Nexus devices are rootable by design. If you call yourself a hacker (this is hacker news... right?) and have turned your nose up at Android so far, you're simply missing out on the future of portable devices. iOS is catered to non-technical consumers and its feature-set (both for users as well as for developers) is accordingly restricted. The future killer apps are being written for Android today and you're not aware of what a mobile device is (and should be) capable of today and by extension, tomorrow. [Edit: 1, 2 and 3 in that list above are paid apps btw. Checkout out the install numbers for those three on the play-store. Android developers writing stuff for Android (and not just copying stale iOS material) are making plenty of money]

bad_user 13y ago
Android is awesome for the way it lets apps interoperate. The "share with" functionality is just one example and it's not just for photos either. For example if you have Readability installed, you can "share" the article to Readability from within both Chrome and Firefox (speaking of which, Firefox isn't available on iOS because Apple doesn't allow it). I would like to add to your list the ability to completely block phone calls and SMS messages from annoying numbers, with no traces left in the phone's logs. Or the ability to automate your phone settings, depending on time or location, like turning the data off at 11 p.m. for battery preservation or turning silent while you're at work. I don't know if such apps are still banned on iTunes, but it's what made me switch from an iPhone 3GS to a Galaxy S.
- 13y ago

EliPenwell 13y ago

just as Leslie replied I didnt know that any one can make $6590 in 4 weeks on the computer. her explanation www.DROp80.com

wizzard 13y ago

Sure, the release process might be easier on Android, but there are other factors involved in app development. Android is becoming a kind of curse word at my current job. Getting a working emulator can be a huge exercise in frustration (like for gMaps v2... forget it). Every and any feature or UI widget can break in unexpected ways on different devices. The tools are very functional but about as unintuitive and finicky as you can get. And I can tell you the documentation is not shorter because it's better. I have nothing personal against Android, but let's not just skim over the actual DEVELOPMENT process.

general_failure 13y ago
Sorry but it sounds like you are a android noob
- wizzard 13y ago
  Sorry, but it sounds like you are a troll. I'd be happy to give details if you don't know (or don't care to see) what I'm talking about. But based on the upvotes to my comment and very similar complaints in other comments to this article, many people agree with me.

zmmmmm 13y ago

A lot of people seem to be missing the main point here. I don't think the article is actually advocating developing for Android and NOT iOS. I don't think it is even particularly advocating releasing on Android first. However starting your development on Android - as your first way of prototyping and finding your MVP - gives you a tremendous amount of agility and flexibility. You can create as many APKs as you want, send them to whoever you want without any fuss and they can test them out. You can fix bugs or implement features for just one person and send them the APK the same day. You can integrate your app with the OS and other apps in ways that are impossible on iOS to find what really works and matters to your users. And you can do all this for virtually zero cost on commodity hardware with free tools. In other words, even if you believe iOS is ultimately going to be your primary platform, there's still a strong argument to do your initial prototyping and development on Android.

engrenage 13y ago
There are more Android apps than iOS apps, and this advantage has always been present. So, why aren't Android apps already of superior quality?
- zmmmmm 13y ago
  Well, so many reasons ... until 4.0 the whole framework was ugly and the tools were very immature compared to where they are now. Few developers, especially ones who care about design, had much or any experience building apps for Android. A lot of early Android developers were either people with no experience at all or iOS developers who tried to apply iOS principles to Android development and failed hard. And it's possible the Android user base in general cared less about design so that in itself was not such a high priority (perhaps this is not so true now). But aside from all that, this discussion is not really about quality per se. It is about figuring out your business idea, getting it right. Whether you then go and execute it well after that point is a different point.
  - engrenage 13y ago
    > But aside from all that, this discussion is not really about quality per se. It is about figuring out your business idea, getting it right. But surely the same logic applies to this too. Why haven't we already seen all kinds of innovative business ideas emerging through the rapid iteration that Android supposedly enables?

brennenHN 13y ago

I love the point about iteration here, but I think this post is a little bit disingenuous. The problem with developing for Android as a startup is that baseline reliability is incredibly resource intensive. If you want your app to work on the most popular few devices, you will still have to spend a considerable amount of time and money testing the different configurations and fixing bugs that have nothing to do with your core functionality. If you want broad support to address most of the market, you're going to be spending a huge amount of development time tweaking little details of your code. When you fix a bug for the Galaxy S4, it'll start crashing on the HTC One X, and the Galaxy Note will never look quite right. Iteration is valuable, but iOS lets you build one product and iterate on it, to build for Android, you have to start by building 15.

general_failure 13y ago
There we go with this fragmentation bullshit. Say something concrete. BTW I had the same problem - what works on iPad 3 didn't work on iPhone 4 and I fixes something that didn't work on touch.
jordanthoms 13y ago
Any specifics on that? Unless you are doing something really weird, there shouldn't be compatibility issues between recent devices like that. Generally the issues are with older devices that have very little ram etc, which are becoming less and less common.

Mikeb85 13y ago

There are plenty of apps (including games) on the Play store with 100,000+ purchases (not just free installs), and I know of at least a few that cost $3+ with 500,000 to 1,000,000 purchases, and Minecraft has 1-5 million puchases at ($6,99? - forgot). This means that the possibility to make 6-7 figures on Android apps is there, if your app is compelling enough. The problem isn't getting users to pay, but making an app compelling enough that users want to pay for it.

so898 13y ago

So every startup group should buy 300+ Android devices to test their application?

bobbles 13y ago

Things that annoy me about buying android apps since I switched to a nexus 4 this week: No way to in-app upgrade to remove ads. what?? (you have to buy a separate app). Heaps of games / apps that dont even provide an option to remove the ads. I feel like a lot of android developers are going to miss out on people moving from iOS to android now that the OS has matured and has improved a lot of the areas that iOS users were worried about. These are people willing to whip out the card and pay because they're accustomed to it on iOS. If there is no way for me to remove ads from an app I am more likely to uninstall it then use it with ads.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

zerny 13y ago

Android sucks

t1m 13y ago

>1990 is calling… and it wants its product development cycle back. In the early 1990s, many developers were using an OS called Unix, with esoteric tools like vi, make, sh, and emacs. They wrote software in ancient languages like C, C++, Python, and Objective-C. Their programs communicated over TCP/IP networks using sockets. If you were lucky enough to be working on a military contract, you would be exchanging documents using XML and HTML papa SGML. Everyone suffered until the major breakthroughs of Javascript and PHP.

general_failure 13y ago
Huh? It was windows basically and iteration was depending on the App author.
- t1m 13y ago
  In 1990 microsoftland, most people were still using DOS. Borland had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C products on the market for a number of years - vt100 style text menuing systems were still king in MS-DOS. Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, which was the real starting adoption point for the majority of the market. By that time, the NeXT computer had already been out for four years, the Mac and X Windows were eight. I was actually just pointing out that software development, as a discipline hasn't advanced that much since 1990. The number of KLOCs freely available to use within your code has increased dramatically. The documentation (which was on paper pre-WWW) has improved exponentially. The tools, OSes and languages? Pretty much a plateau there since the mid 80s peak.
  - general_failure 13y ago
    OK, you win. But you completely missed the point of 1990 in that post (hint: he meant windows)

jmtame 13y ago

Three words: high fidelity prototypes. You can use them irregardless of the process to distribute your application. You should already have customer feedback on your app before you even commit engineering resources to write production quality code, and there's no excuse not to be prototyping and getting customer feedback far before you release it to the app store for the masses.

eonil 13y ago

Wrong. Completely wrong. Stop trying this stupid wording fraud. What the hell the Android means? The users? Or the cartel? Android users are never starving for beautiful apps. The Android cartel does. Android users always starving for free stuffs, not beautiful. What kind of idiot choose Android for beautiful apps instead of iOS which is already-existing and also proven? Android has no beautiful apps because the users don't want it. Market share? Market share itself doesn't make money. Especially blind market is purely useless. This article is just a mutated clone of crappy meme: "Say market share, and never say how the market share will make money.". Even Google and telecoms are making more money on iOS. Android is pretty attractive toy for a developer. But for business? No kidding.

habosa 13y ago

The speed of pushing to the Play Store can't be overrated for startups. If you release an app that has a critical bug this is what happens: iOS: Fix it, wait days-weeks for approval, push the update Android: Fix it, wait 30 seconds, update pushed to everyone If the bug is big enough, this can be the difference between losing all of your initial users and gaining critical mass.

shinratdr 13y ago

What makes it good for startups also makes it good for malware, spam apps, information harvesting and other user unfriendly things. I'm not arguing against this post, it's true in the sense that it is indisputably easier to iterate on Android vs iOS because of the lack of a review system. But as someone with both Android and iOS devices that they enjoy, it's very easy to see which one is a more user-friendly approach. Having a broken app or two for a week is a small price to pay for trust. I don't trust the Play Store, I check out each individual app before downloading. On iOS because of the more robust review & permissions model, I can trust that while what I download might not be good, it will in all likelihood be safe. In addition, I feel like evangelizing to developers like this is pointless. Besides the minority of personal developers driven primarily by morals, their preferred platform or preferred tools, developers go where the users are and the money is. If "Android is for startups" then that should be the case, and a blog post isn't going to make it so. The presence of startups iterating on Android initially makes it so, and that is driven by users + money.

frozenport 13y ago

Android is for judicious, poor foreigners and not the hip kids that would pay 4x for a carwash ordered by phone. I recal the pruce gauging by travel companies who increase airfair by 10% when an Apple brpwser was detected.

moubarak 13y ago

i don't have much to say, but i develop camera apps and i also started with Android and then moved to iOS. The transition was swift because of iOS's screen sizes/resolutions were well defined and straight forward, no fragmentation manager was required to handle different screens. Although i was using a single device for Android, i couldn't help but write a generic manager to handle different screens rather than hardcode my prototype to a single device. On the other hand, iOS screen and camera previews are hardcoded by design, and that saved me a lot of time. Android being open source helped quite a bit, since i could borrow all that code from the stock camera app, but it was tedious to say the least. When i transitioned to iOS i was surprised how fast i got my basic camera app to work (few hours perhaps). There are other reasons why i find iOS to be superior for prototyping (i have only touched on the camera preview issue). One other example is the relative documentation. iOS documentation gets you going much faster when working with the camera at least. Just my 2 cents.

golergka 13y ago

> release cycle of the App Store encourages the perfectionist in all of us to make it “done” Isn't that exactly the reason for Apple's policies?

aufreak3 13y ago

> Besides, have you tried Android recently? You might be suprised to discover that Android is better. .. not yet for music apps. Even Google folks admit that [1]. This really can't wait any longer. Where is Garage Band for Android please? ... and to those saying "you can't complain only about music, look at the games, todo lists, blah blah", sorry music IS my domain and that's the only thing I care about. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c

mentat 13y ago

Since this is still floating around /best, I highly recommend http://hockeyapp.net/ http://hockeyapp.net/ SoundFocus is using it for their betas and it "just works" for distribution and updating. Feels like the app store too.