Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? It wasn't.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/androids-champions-defend-os-against-steve-jobs/

by minalecs • 16 years ago

20 14 16 years ago

minalecs• 16 years ago

Steve should of actually talked to Android developers of major apps before making these claims.

Zev2• 16 years ago

How about "minor" developers? By that, I mean people who would make an app as a hobby in their spare time. How easy is it for them?

jeanvaljean2• 16 years ago

Extremely easy. You can quite literally start from not knowing anything about Android development and, in an evening, have a simple app up in the Marketplace.

...and before anyone responds with "well, that's just going to lead to a bunch of bad apps in the store," I ask you to count the number of fart apps in Apple's App Store. Though I'm sure they're all quality fart apps...

evilduck• 16 years ago

Probably easier than iOS, which has the prerequisite of running OSX. A "minor" developer without a Mac needs to buy one or build a hackintosh, both are significantly more work than downloading Android's SDK. And more people know Java than Obj-C, so there's that too.

foobarbazetc• 16 years ago

Why? Developing for Android is a pain in the arse, especially once you're done and testing in the field.

There are hundreds of devices, all different, all with their own bugs and all running different versions of the OS to deal with. This is J2ME all over again.

That doesn't mean it's impossible, it just means it takes longer. It also means you need to go out and buy a tonne of development/testing phones.

All of the above might be okay for people with money and/or investment, but makes it difficult for small developers. Let's not even begin to talk about the Android Market, supported seller/buyer countries, currency display, return policies, etc, etc.

Compare that to iOS -- Apple rolls out an update to the OS, it works on all devices, and they're all identical. There's far less testing required (version N, N-1), and far less hardware investment too. You pop your app up on the App Store and it all 'just works'. That's what Steve is talking about -- integration vs fragmentation.

jinushaun• 16 years ago

Developing and testing on Android wouldn't be so bad if the damn emulator was actually usable. AVDs sound great in theory, but useless in reality. A hobbyist can't afford to buy a couple of dozen phones to test out an app. No wonder Android Market is full of comments about apps not working...

jeanvaljean2• 16 years ago

Do you have an app in the Marketplace?

I'm a developer for a very large Android app that touches more system components than most and we have no place in code where we check for OS version and exactly 3 places where we check for a very specific (bad) phone.

"pop your app up on the App Store" -- after going through Apple's gate. In the Marketplace, we deploy on our schedule, not Apple's.

codingthewheel2• 16 years ago

Yeah, fortunately this is not how software works in practice. The best example is probably the PC market, which is fragmented to such a degree that the hardware permutations are uncountable -- and yet Windows, Linux, other major operating systems and applications all manage to deliver stable, consistent user experiences. The situation with Android is parallel: lots of different hardware, but basically still a "write once, run everywhere" environment. (Everywhere being any phone with a legit Android environment.) Similarly to when you're developing on a PC, you occasionally need to know something about the specific hardware or version you're running against, but more often than not, you just code, and it just works.

codingthewheel2• 16 years ago

How hard is it to run spellcheck before publishing an article for half a million readers?

  compile Android on a home Linux machin--a way

konad• 16 years ago

CEO states rival product is worse than the one his business sells, Film at 11.

Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? It wasn't.

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