For those developers here who have tried both platforms and published some apps in their respective app stores, how have the results been for you?
Pros and Cons?
I'm curious on current real-world experiences, not analyst projections.
I believe this too will help people get off the fence and choose which side to develop for.
Thanks.
I've got no experience with the Android platform, but I'm super curious.
I am an iPhone fan, but it's a state of the art "NO" platform because most of the answers to interesting questions are NO.
It's kinda negative and wearing.
However, coming from the iPhone, the idea of an open platform sounds
like a PITA. How big's the screen? How much RAM, etc. etc. I'll miss
the homogeneity.
Is this what Stockholm syndrome feels like?
Without any experience of Android development, the pros of the iPhone are that it is a platform that does not seem to be fragmenting (i.e. different screen sizes, different hardware controls, different shells) and that it provides a significantly larger market.
Code is code: you should not select a platform based on minor differences in tooling or ease of development.
I'm currently looking into developing for Andriod/iPhone myself, the one major benefit I can see with Android is that you can develop on Windows and don't have to buy a Mac or run OS X on a VM to do it unlike with the iPhone.
Also with Android you only have to pay $25 (just the once I think too) to get your applications onto the marketplace.
Yes, you can spend $399 on a dev version of the G1 but there's a pretty good emulator too.
Quite rightly, code is code at the end of the day, but you also have to factor in development costs. Android is significantly cheaper, however there's a smaller user abse in comparison to iPhone users.
Think who you want to cater for with your app.
As far as real world experience goes, I can't say I've touched the iPhone SDk on the basis you have to pay for it before you can even glance at it where as Android is free and I'm playing about with it at the moment. It's not too difficult and reasonably easy to use.
I made a app for iPhone. It was rejected, and my 4 months of work were for nothing.
I made a app for Android. It was rejected from the Android Market, but since Android is open, I could still sell it on my own website and I make a steady income.
Here's something to consider - the number of Jailbroken iPhones is probably larger than the overall number of Android phones currently on the market.
If you can live within the confines of the App Store, you have a huge potential market (make sure to always allow for Touches for maximum reach).
But if you have an app that cannot live in the app store for some reason, there's always the Cydia market.
Why not do an app for both platforms and see how it goes on either? I'm not sure there's a one size fits all answer here, since the correct answer for any one person depends both on the app, and on personal philosophy.
I have found the iPhone documentation to be more complete and the Cocoa Touch API more intuitive. Android is a bit of a mess. However at least I have the source code so I can spend hours tracing functions in order to understand an undocumented method. As the sarcasm implies this is both a blessing and a PITA.
There is one thing I find very frustrating and just learned this after putting my first android ap up on the marketplace recently.
First let me just say I'm not a fan of Apple at all. I'll most likely never buy another Apple product. I run only linux at my home (and windows at work) so constricting me with iTunes lost this customer.
Having said that, I'm having force close issues with my new app on all devices other than the Moto Droid (which I'm deving on). This is extremely frustrating as I continue getting 1-2 stars on an app that I can't fix because I'm not going to buy like a 100 phones out there. My impression is the platform is not stable.
What I'm trying to say is that with Apple only having to dev on like 2 phones, the itouch and ipad means that eveyone is running close to the same platform. This is a HUGE plus.