Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

Summary: The author is a long-time Windows developer and extremely familiar with Visual Studio. He likes the WP7 development environment best. He can deal with Eclipse for Android, but he finds iOS development with Xcode counterintuitive.<p>I'm not sure the author is really distinguishing between his personal tastes and the actual characteristics of each platform. But his personal tastes are shared by an enormous number of Windows developers, so based on his blog post, I imagine that WP7 will succeed with in-house corporate developers. Interesting.

This is total shallow flaimbait.<p>As a C#/Ruby developer I embarked on the somewhat painful journey of learning Objective-C a few weeks ago. I got my first personal app written to control my Denon 3808 remote.<p>Admittedly it would have taken me a fraction of the time in either C# or Java ... square bracket central is something that is hard to get used to.<p>However, I find the whole experience of developing on iOS very well documented ... this is not COM development with MFC, it is much more approachable. It is a pleasure to have a language that has its roots in Smalltalk and having a fairly comprehensive yet-not-gigantic set of support classes is great. Objective C delegates are nice, the evented style it offers is nice. Auto release pools take away a lot of the pain of memory management. I am sure that after a few months of development in Objective C I would be quite productive. However I still prefer C#. Also, I prefer Ruby over C#.<p>When I first learned WPF a few years ago I could not believe the bloat of the base library, it took weeks to really understand how all the XAML stuff works, building custom controls was tricky business.<p>Today, Silverlight (which has its roots in WPF) is much more polished. As far as I can see if you use the toolkit and controls that ship with WP7 development is quite seamless. However, my understanding is that the iOS set of APIs are more comprehensive due to the huge first to market advantage they have.<p>There are lots of very subtle advantages to each of these platforms that only and expert in all 3 could point out. That is an article I would love to read.

"Objective-C sucks" is just silly. If you know and like C#, of course you'll like developing for WP7 more. Weird that he talks about null references in Objective-C but you can send all kinds of messages to nil and you'll be fine. Not so in C#/Java.

Complaining that Apple's docs say it's easy is unreasonable. I'm sure microsoft's docs say so too. The problem isn't that Apple says it's easy, the problem is tha it's not easy. It's not even hard. It's stupid.<p>I speak as an iOS developer and long time Apple devotee. The way Apple manages signing and submission is a cruel joke. It was ok as a "get it out the door NOW" beta in, what, 2008, but it's barely improved. I spend more time figuring out wh signing failed than finding actual bugs.<p>I don't think arguing obj-c is useless to learn is fair, but he you're a windows guy. IMHO learn new languages is seldom useless, and I'd rather learn obj-c than c# for the exact sam reasons you'd rather learn c#, and I'd argue the intellectual benefit from learning obj-c exceeds that of adding c# to java or vice versa.

I have developed for Android, and recently started developing WP7. So far, I prefer the development environment and tools for WP7. Silverlight + Blend studio allows for quick and beautiful apps, and XNA studio does much of the work necessary to get the frame updating and rendering working. So far I am impressed with WP7.

The author says Marketplace approval is usually quick at about 2 days.<p>Except when you are one of the many developers whose apps get stuck in the marketplace, that never get approved or rejected because of lousy infrastructure on Microsofts side.<p>A developer I highly respect wrote about his ongoing struggle getting his Google Voice client out for WP7. If he wasn't already known from his MVP work, it's unlikely he would even have got those [extremely unhelpful] responses from Microsoft.<p><a href="http://www.koushikdutta.com/2010/12/windows-phone-marketplace-woes.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.koushikdutta.com/2010/12/windows-phone-marketplac...</a>

So my takeaway is that he prefers using Visual Studio and C# to write mobile applications, followed by java/eclipse/emacs for the android and Xcode/ObjC bringing up the rear.<p>I think its a fair assessment, as someone who spends his daytime hours in VS2010 writing C#, the tools are first rate. I personally like objective C as a language(I think C# and .NET is growing at a rate that will tire of keeping up with before too long where objective C is lean and easy to learn), and feel that things could be better if XCode were better. That said, the iPhone simulator is at least 100 fold better than the WP7 emulator.

My experiences with Android and iOS dev has been pretty bad. Android has unbelievably crappy tools. Mac iOS dev tools are beautiful and extremely slick, however I couldn't figure them out. Objective-C is a huge blocking issue for me.<p>Recently been using Titanium Mobile which I'm starting to really like. It makes iPhone dev really nice. With Android dev though you still have to deal with the crappy tools provided by Google (compiler, emulator, packager).<p>I don't doubt Visual Studio has a much easier development process for apps. C# is a decent language for that kind of thing. But I don't think I could bring myself back to ever using Windows again for development (even in a VM).

&#62;Android is better for being able to develop on your platform of choice (though I suspect developing on Mac is best supported)...<p>Quickly like to point out that Eclipse on OS X is atrocious.

My main concern with WP7 is that it can run only managed code (see <a href="http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsphone7series/thread/096b66ee-23c1-47b7-a768-bc2ae9e94c7c" rel="nofollow">http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsphone7s...</a> for example).<p>This means that existing non-.NET code has to be rewritten from scratch to be ported to WP7, while on iPhone and Android it is possible to link native code.<p>If a developer wants to write the same application on iPhone or Android and WP7, basically no code can be shared. Is it worth it?

IMO the comparison between these platforms is only interesting when you take alternate languages into account. We know Java, C#, and Objective C are all way behind, so how do more advanced languages fare on these platforms?

So, square brackets are the new parenthesis for language arguments.