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Android is for startups

514 pointsby willwhitneyover 11 years ago

58 comments

zmmmmmover 11 years ago
A lot of people seem to be missing the main point here. I don&#x27;t think the article is actually advocating developing for Android and NOT iOS. I don&#x27;t think it is even particularly advocating releasing on Android first. However <i>starting</i> 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.<p>In other words, even if you believe iOS is ultimately going to be your primary platform, there&#x27;s <i>still</i> a strong argument to do your initial prototyping and development on Android.
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discostringsover 11 years ago
Being in the process of registering my LLC for an iOS Apple Developer account, I couldn&#x27;t agree more. It&#x27;s been over two months now of back-and-forth with Apple and Dun &amp; Bradstreet, and the end is still not in sight. All I&#x27;d like them to do is take my $100 and give me the ability to test the free app I&#x27;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&#x27;t have to do that. As someone who&#x27;s somewhat interested in their platform but not dying to develop for it, I&#x27;m not going to do that.)
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chetanahujaover 11 years ago
Lots of &quot;Android apps are no good&quot; chiming in going on here. I&#x27;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&#x27;t find the following apps on iOS.<p>1) Alternate Launcher with pretty much infinite flexibility on look and feel.<p>2) Swype like keyboard options. Typing anything on iOS now feels like I travelled back in time to horse-and-buggy era.<p>3) Tasker app. Enough said.<p>4) Google Now. Enough said.<p>5) This is not an app per se, but the &quot;share with&quot; 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.<p>And this is not even counting all the hacker&#x27;y goodness of having a full root shell with an almost complete debian environment on my Nexus devices. No &quot;jailbreak&quot; required. Nexus devices are rootable by design.<p>If you call yourself a hacker (this is hacker news... right?) and have turned your nose up at Android so far, you&#x27;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&#x27;re not aware of what a mobile device is (and should be) capable of today and by extension, tomorrow.<p>[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 <i>for</i> Android (and not just copying stale iOS material) are making plenty of money]
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jcromartieover 11 years ago
I know that Android users are starved for slick apps that look good and work well, because I&#x27;m one of them (when using my Nexus 7). But as a developer I know that I can&#x27;t make money from them.<p>There is no way forward for (paid) Android apps that can make a living. You <i>need</i> to sell on iOS in order to make any sort of revenue.<p>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.
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avolcanoover 11 years ago
&gt; 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.<p>That&#x27;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).<p>Of course, many startups profit in hype instead of dollars, so maybe that&#x27;s irrelevant.
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robbfitzsimmonsover 11 years ago
As a primarily-iOS user &#x2F; developer who also has an Android tablet (last year&#x27;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.]<p>It&#x27;s hard enough to peg a real user need and deliver on that need in a satisfying, sticky way. It&#x27;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.<p>As others have mentioned, though, none of these app startups are launching just for a smooth development experience. And Android just hasn&#x27;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&#x27;s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem on app quality.
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dasil003over 11 years ago
This seems like really forced wishful thinking. Sure Apple makes you jump through a lot of annoying hoops, but it doesn&#x27;t matter how cynical you are you can&#x27;t hand-wave away the security benefits, and you certainly can&#x27;t ignore the revenue differentials. I think Android is moving in the right direction, and actually I&#x27;ve used it as my primary phone for years now (I&#x27;ve owned 2 Nexus phones and the old G1), but waiting 5 days for approval (which is the average I&#x27;ve experienced for 6 submissions over the last 2 months) is not as big of a hurdle as the article paints. There&#x27;s certainly nothing that requires waterfall development or &quot;waiting months&quot;.
badman_tingover 11 years 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.<p>I dunno, I make web stuff. I just like watching you guys duke it out.
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domnessover 11 years 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 &quot;lean&quot; 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.<p>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 &quot;just right&quot; 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.<p>I love iOS development, and yes, I agree with most people on here about the revenue from iOS, the people paying for apps, Apple&#x27;s process of helping keep out most malware etc. etc., but for the sake of a &quot;lean&quot; startup, spending extra weeks testing apps making sure it&#x27;s completely bug free and &quot;looking good enough&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>TL;DR<p>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.
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ensmotkoover 11 years ago
Another thing that bothers me with development for iOS is that you <i>need</i> apple hardware and software. I can&#x27;t develop an iOS on my Linux machine (I&#x27;ve tried running OSX in virtualbox, but it&#x27;s slow and not to mention illegal).<p>I really wish Apple would make their platform a little more available. Lowering the $100 yearly fee would be a good start...
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wizzardover 11 years 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&#x27;s better.<p>I have nothing personal against Android, but let&#x27;s not just skim over the actual DEVELOPMENT process.
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brennenHNover 11 years ago
I love the point about iteration here, but I think this post is a little bit disingenuous.<p>The problem with developing for Android as a startup is that baseline reliability is incredibly resource intensive.<p>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.<p>If you want broad support to address most of the market, you&#x27;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&#x27;ll start crashing on the HTC One X, and the Galaxy Note will never look quite right.<p>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.
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PStamatiouover 11 years ago
Great post -- As a newly diehard Android user, I will agree that while Android is definitely getting some amazing and beautiful apps, it&#x27;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.<p><a href="http://paulstamatiou.com/android-is-better" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulstamatiou.com&#x2F;android-is-better</a>
venomsnakeover 11 years 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.<p>Then we made a simple single developer account ... personal. It took only a month.
tomasienover 11 years ago
It&#x27;s perfectly fine to argue the merits of Android development, but arguing that it&#x27;s hard to run an app on your own device using XCode is dishonest. It handles provisioning profiles automatically, and you can even hit &quot;fix it&quot; if it doesn&#x27;t find a valid one when you try to run it.<p>I&#x27;ve been building an app for Android for 2 weeks now, and I still can&#x27;t get the phone settings on an Android phone to use it for development. This may be MY problem because I&#x27;m a terrible developer, but it&#x27;s still a problem.
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grosenover 11 years ago
Free apps do well on Android. Paid apps (Outright &amp; 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.<p>Until Android on a whole proves to be more lucrative to monetize apps, many developers will continue building iOS first (imho).
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9999over 11 years ago
The iOS development cycle works the way it does to protect Apple&#x27;s customers. The people that pay for your application deserve and demand a certain level of quality. They also shouldn&#x27;t be constantly bothered with updating your hastily developed, poorly tested, &#x27;rapidly iterating&#x27; product.<p>As for Android, Google doesn&#x27;t care. The person with the Android phone is not their customer, they&#x27;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&#x27;s really just to feed more users to their advertisers by making a product that&#x27;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.
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rjvirover 11 years 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 &amp; software, common design patterns, a robust developer ecosystem, and generally a more sophisticated development platform.
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andrewcamelover 11 years ago
If you&#x27;re alright ignoring the far more profitable iOS market, then sure, Android is better. But if you&#x27;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&#x27;m ok dealing with the headaches that come with it.
umsmover 11 years ago
I don&#x27;t agree with this.<p>Basically the author thinks that you can test the market if a particular idea &#x2F; 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.<p>When releasing an app on iOS, you don&#x27;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.<p>That&#x27;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.
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anigbrowlover 11 years ago
Design is an easy win on Android, but it&#x27;s the suck for any kind of audio processing because of the horrendous lag. Like MS before them, Google completely ignored the needs&#x2F;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.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s where the good stuff is.
grbalaffaover 11 years 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&#x27;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:<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2973270/using-a-custom-typeface-in-android" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;2973270&#x2F;using-a-custom-ty...</a><p>(Yes, the thread was started in 2010, but scroll to the bottom to see more recent comments -- things have scarcely gotten any better.)<p>Anyone who has actually deployed a non-trivial app on both Android and iOS knows quite well which one is the &quot;better&quot; development environment.
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samspencover 11 years ago
Excellent write-up. As a mobile developer, this was my experience publishing Android apps to Play store as well.<p>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.
lukabratosover 11 years ago
&quot;Knock, knock.&quot; &quot;Who’s there?&quot; &quot;Very long pause….&quot; &quot;Java.&quot;
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gte910hover 11 years ago
I&#x27;m a 3rd party iOS developer:<p>If you want to make money by directly selling something, or need people who constantly use your app =&gt; iOS still seems to have higher engagement and higher revenue.<p>If you want to make money by having a thing you&#x27;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.<p>That said, &quot;Android&quot; isn&#x27;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.<p>With both versions, it&#x27;s always really important to measure cost per user on a version by version, platform by platform basis.
markshepardover 11 years 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.<p>While we have had our share of frusturation with the apple app store process (weird rejections that had to be explained etc), I don&#x27;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)
leemhoffmanover 11 years 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:<p>- 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<p>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.
Mikeb85over 11 years 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).<p>This means that the possibility to make 6-7 figures on Android apps is there, if your app is compelling enough. The problem isn&#x27;t getting users to pay, but making an app compelling enough that users want to pay for it.
zeropover 11 years 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?
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bobblesover 11 years ago
Things that annoy me about buying android apps since I switched to a nexus 4 this week:<p>No way to in-app upgrade to remove ads. what?? (you have to buy a separate app).<p>Heaps of games &#x2F; apps that dont even provide an option to remove the ads.<p>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&#x27;re accustomed to it on iOS.<p>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.
shinratdrover 11 years ago
What makes it good for startups also makes it good for malware, spam apps, information harvesting and other user unfriendly things.<p>I&#x27;m not arguing against this post, it&#x27;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&#x27;s very easy to see which one is a more user-friendly approach.<p>Having a broken app or two for a week is a small price to pay for trust. I don&#x27;t trust the Play Store, I check out each individual app before downloading. On iOS because of the more robust review &amp; permissions model, I can trust that while what I download might not be good, it will in all likelihood be safe.<p>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 &quot;Android is for startups&quot; then that should be the case, and a blog post isn&#x27;t going to make it so. The presence of startups iterating on Android initially makes it so, and that is driven by users + money.
trimboover 11 years ago
VCs all have iPhones. This is the #1 reason to develop for iPhone first.
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x0054over 11 years 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&#x27;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.
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myndover 11 years ago
I think a little barrier to entry is a good thing. App Store is saturated as it is.
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aufreak3over 11 years ago
&gt; Besides, have you tried Android recently? You might be suprised to discover that Android is better.<p>.. not yet for music apps. Even Google folks admit that [1]. This <i>really</i> can&#x27;t wait any longer. Where is Garage Band for Android please? ... and to those saying &quot;you can&#x27;t complain only about music, look at the games, todo lists, blah blah&quot;, sorry music <i>IS</i> my domain and that&#x27;s the <i>only</i> thing I care about.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c</a>
t1mover 11 years ago
&gt;1990 is calling… and it wants its product development cycle back.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p>Everyone suffered until the major breakthroughs of Javascript and PHP.
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joshstrangeover 11 years ago
Have you ever tried TestFlight for iOS testing&#x2F;dev? I&#x27;m not saying the Apple process is perfect (I agree it sucks) but TestFlight makes getting test builds out much easier.
nathan_longover 11 years 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.<p>They made me complete a questionnaire about exactly which kinds of Apple products I wanted to develop for, and &quot;none&quot; wasn&#x27;t an option. That&#x27;s kind of a weird, Apple-centric worldview. &quot;Errrm, I&#x27;m doing web development...&quot;
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Apocryphonover 11 years ago
This is the most tiresome religious war. While it&#x27;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.
habosaover 11 years ago
The speed of pushing to the Play Store can&#x27;t be overrated for startups. If you release an app that has a critical bug this is what happens:<p>iOS: Fix it, wait days-weeks for approval, push the update<p>Android: Fix it, wait 30 seconds, update pushed to everyone<p>If the bug is big enough, this can be the difference between losing all of your initial users and gaining critical mass.
alayneover 11 years ago
Why don&#x27;t they build a web app if they want to iterate faster?
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frozenportover 11 years 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.
lusciousover 11 years ago
Does this article need to exist? Who is this preaching to?
dangerboysteveover 11 years ago
Check back in 1-2 years and see how much publishing to Play is any easier than Apple&#x27;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&#x27;s play is starting to encounter.
jmtameover 11 years 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&#x27;s no excuse not to be prototyping and getting customer feedback far before you release it to the app store for the masses.
moubarakover 11 years ago
i don&#x27;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&#x27;s screen sizes&#x2F;resolutions were well defined and straight forward, no fragmentation manager was required to handle different screens.<p>Although i was using a single device for Android, i couldn&#x27;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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>Just my 2 cents.
golergkaover 11 years ago
&gt; release cycle of the App Store encourages the perfectionist in all of us to make it “done”<p>Isn&#x27;t that exactly the reason for Apple&#x27;s policies?
namenotrequiredover 11 years ago
As Paul Graham said... <a href="http://paulgraham.com/apple.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;apple.html</a>
chjover 11 years 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.<p>Despite the fact that iOS has much better design and comes with much better developer tools, Android is nowadays the better choice.
mentatover 11 years ago
Since this is still floating around &#x2F;best, I highly recommend <a href="http://hockeyapp.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hockeyapp.net&#x2F;</a> SoundFocus is using it for their betas and it &quot;just works&quot; for distribution and updating. Feels like the app store too.
liyanageover 11 years ago
<i>Having to make sure that everything is perfect before you ship</i><p>As a user, that sounds pretty good to me...
scrrrover 11 years ago
Sorry, but this is not a good article.<p>Instead of telling me what to do based on a small dataset of evidence, I&#x27;d much rather read what you have done. What worked for you. I don&#x27;t think the author knows what he is talking about.
so898over 11 years ago
So every startup group should buy 300+ Android devices to test their application?
eonilover 11 years ago
Wrong. Completely wrong. Stop trying this stupid wording fraud.<p>What the hell <i>the Android</i> means? The users? Or the cartel? Android users are never starving for beautiful apps. <i>The Android cartel</i> does. Android users always starving for free stuffs, not beautiful. What kind of idiot choose Android <i></i>for beautiful apps instead of iOS<i></i> which is already-existing and also proven? Android has no beautiful apps because the users don&#x27;t want it.<p>Market share? Market share itself doesn&#x27;t make money. Especially blind market is purely useless. This article is just a mutated clone of crappy meme: &quot;Say market share, and never say how the market share will make money.&quot;. Even Google and telecoms are making more money on iOS.<p>Android is pretty attractive toy for a developer. But for business? No kidding.
shmerlover 11 years ago
I&#x27;d say Sailfish is for startups.
zernyover 11 years ago
Android sucks
benihanaover 11 years 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&#x27;t on the Play Store.
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antidailyover 11 years ago
_______________ is broken.