Submitted by The Guardian reports on some statistics showing developer income and download statistics for Android vs iOS apps. From The Guardian “Will more developers remove their iOS blinkers in 2012 ? There is some new research to chew over on this matter. We’ll start with analytics firm Flurry, which regularly publishes stats on trends among the 55,000 developers using its tools in their apps”
This study only reflects what seems to be the US landscape.
Here in Europe I see lots of people around with Android phones, much more than iPhones.
There are some countries that have lots of iPhone users, but there are also countries where the iPhones are only bought by very rich people.
Whatever US analysts say, truth is, at least in what concerns Europe, if you want to reach users you will have to target Android.
…target both?
I would have thought that was a no brainer…
I’m a fan of Android. If you ask me, ICS is the pinnacle of mobile OS’s and even has a strong potential to become a desktop OS in a not too distant future.
BUT… Developing for Android looks like a torture. Eclipse, The Eclipse Android plugin, lacking documentation. That’s one thing I will give to iOS (probably the only one): Xcode 4 is wonderful, integrated. Installed in two minutes, you write your Hello World app in ten minutes without previous knowledge of the language. Of course Obj-C may seem like an awkward choice, but it’s mostly syntaxic sugar (bitter-sweet sugar).
It looks like doing the same on Android is one day worth of installing the SDK, googling, understanding obnoxious things, installing plugins, uninstalling plugins, installing the right version of another plugin and one day worth of programming, due to bad documentation. And Eclipse… Hello, an IDE in Java? (I know, I know, Java isn’t slow, it’s only perceived as slow. But that’s a strong perception). After two days, you should have your helloworld.apk and lost any willingness to program for it.