I use an Android every day, and my wife has an iPhone. The absolute biggest thing that annoyed me about using the iPhone after being used to the Android is the lack of a dedicated hardware back button. The problem you describe about an app opening the browser and then trying to get back to the app on the same screen you left it is so irritating in iOS - It's a huge glaring issue that is seamless on Android.
I love these compare-and-contrast articles about developing on different smartphone platforms, but I'm interested to see how the second-tier ones go, as well. I've heard that webOS is a delight to develop on, WinPho is bad, and I'm not sure about Blackberry OS or the other lower-tier ones.
I personally love how android handles the latest activity window by dragging down the top area. Is there something similar on iOS4?. This and the back button are really good features.
Good feedback. Makes some good points; the pixel-perfect layout vs. flow layout is a very significant difference. We've done a similar bullet-point writeup: <a href="http://voxilate.blogspot.com/2010/11/ios-and-android-odd-development-couple.html" rel="nofollow">http://voxilate.blogspot.com/2010/11/ios-and-android-odd-dev...</a><p>One major pain point is dealing with fragmentation. Of course iOS is no stranger to this, but it seems Apple does a better job preserving backwards compatibility. On Android there are wholesale API changes between 1.x and 2.x, and apparently Honeycomb revamps the entire Activity UI framework. Yuck.
Interesting to hear the differences between the two platforms re: design constraints. Helps explain a lot about why it takes many other apps so long to develop an android version. Looking forward to a better Android version of Bump, since the last wasn't always reliable.
I often hear about important UI changes when porting from iPhone to Android to make the app look more native. Could you (OP or anyone else with the experience) be more specific of what they are? Some examples?
I was excited when he started talking about the resolution differences but then quickly bummed that he didn't even scratch the surface to talk about just how the changes affected the development.