Every year we see the same promise: this is the year that Android-first development will become a reality. At the same time we see big companies like Instagram repeatedly introduce new apps that are iOS-only. Android has been able to tout more market share than iOS for quite some time, but that doesn’t seem to have translated into app developers releasing Android apps at the same time as their iOS counterparts, much less Android-first. Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking with developers and researching why this is still the case.
A major reason not discussed in this article: the large companies – Twitter, Facebook, etc. – as well as the major technology press outlets, are all US-based, and clearly have a very US-centric view of the world (or maybe at the very least an Anglo-Saxon view). In the US, iOS and Android both sit at around ~45% market share, so it makes sense that developers working for these companies focus on iOS more than on Android, simply because iOS development tends to be an easier experience (I’m simply echoing what I hear from developers on both sides of the aisle). The same applies to the technology press.
Outside of the English-speaking countries, however, Android reigns supreme. If these companies had a more world-centric view, their Android efforts would surely improve – because as it stands right now, most major companies’ Android applications lag behind their iOS counterparts considerably. Over here in The Netherlands, though, every major new local application – banks, brands, stores, etc. – are always iOS+Android on day one.
It’d be great if American companies finally started getting their acts together too. Don’t assume that veteran iOS developers are automatically also good Android developers (they’re not), and hire real, proper Android developers. I translate English to Dutch, and my clients would never ask me to translate, I don’t know, Spanish documents into Dutch. Small indie Android developers have proven that, even if it may be a little harder, it’s perfectly possible to create Android applications that are just as good as, and often even better, than their iOS counterparts.
In 2015, there’s no excuse for releasing lousy, crappy Android applications. You only have yourself to blame.
You point to a very important point: development environment. In our shop, we find that developing for Android takes about three times longer due to dev-env problems and device fragmentations (yes, we still encounter Froyo users complaining!!!)
Not only is iOS a superior development experience, it’s the only platform that generates revenue for us.
Exactly. iOS user base consists of more customers willing to pay for the content. I think this is main reason.
More as a percentage of the user base or as in total? If the former, the sheer number out android handsets would easily offset that, but if the latter the iOS only strategy makes total sense.
For pay up-front or freemium/IAP apps at least, many developers seem to only consider premium/flagship phone users as potential paying customers. It kind of makes sense from a businessman’s perspective. If they’ve got money to splurge on a $600+ phone, then they’re more likely to have money to “impulse buy” apps.
If you go by that logic, I suspect even the total numbers aren’t that different. The iPhone is the single biggest selling premium device in the world.
The ad-supported market is a different story though.
Edited 2015-06-27 03:30 UTC
Well, I’d have to say as some one who has developed for both, that Android is actually easier now. But yeah, the money comes from IOS.
I develop for both too, and it’s also been my experience that it takes longer to build for Android.
I’ve recently finished a project where we built both an iOS and an Android version of the app. We built the iOS version first, followed quickly by the Android version. I started the Android version when we were 3/4 of the way through the iOS app.
From an engineering point of view, it makes sense to focus on one platform first. This way, you only have so solve some problems once, instead of twice, in parallel.
Developer experience is better on iOS. The platform has got the better framework and better tooling. So a case can be made for going iOS first, purely from an engineering point of view.
Why is that? Honest question, because I don’t know. I went from iOS to Android and my mentality toward apps hasn’t changed. I willingly pay for the apps I like, in fact I’d much rather pay than have my CPU and data sucked up by ads. I’ve indeed paid for several apps on Android that do not exist on iOS and have no equivalents there. Is it an app piracy problem, a user mentality problem, or something else?
That being said, none of these apply to Facebook, Twitter, etc. They make money off ads no matter which platform they’re on, so they don’t have the revenue excuse to make poor Android apps. For them, it’s pure laziness.
Unknown. For me, the app is B2B. Companies prefer to buy from a known entity that advertises what they are doing in advance. So they are willing to invest in apple devices, knowing they can always go back and order another batch of identical hardware. Android hardware is less predictably in stock for a given time interval.
You can get the same with Android devices. They are in fact more likely to be available in a few years time than a specific iPhone version is.
Obviously, not *all* android devices. Some? Maybe. Perhaps it is telling that you didn’t name a specific OEM or device.
I blame Google for this. In early android days it was only possible to create free apps for Android. Still there were many people who found it fun to create Android apps, some of them were very good at what they were doing. The end result was that people got used to good free apps, and are even today less willing to pay.
It is no wonder that developers do iOS first when they get two to three times more paying customers from iOS users.
Somehow I doubt this is the reason today. Many, if not most, Android users don’t even remember those days. Hell, the first time I did use Android back in the Gingerbread days there were already loads of really good paid apps. While I’m sure the original state of the Android Market might’ve affected the situation in the beginning, I’d doubt it has anything to do with it now.
The poor state of Android apps is what drove me to get an iPhone in the end. The FB Android app was miserable for years, offering a fraction of the website’s function and being notoriously unreliable, although it’s improved a lot. There just was no decent Twitter app — they all had serious bugs or missing features, or were works in progress, and the progress always stopped when they hit their token limit. I still think the OS itself was better and I miss being able to arrange my home screen, choose my own Messaging app and I actually think the dialler and message on Android are better. But I spend more time on Twitter and FB than on SMS or the phone.
Facebook brought Benoit Schillings in to code the facebook app. That’s why it improved. Course he’s gone to yahoo now. Schillings is one of the top engineers on the planet. He coded BeOS as well.
Facebook improved when they dropped HTML5 and went native. It’s impossible to create a good app in HTML5
Edited 2015-06-27 06:07 UTC
These guys would disagree: http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-love-sto…
I’ve got some shares in an Australian company called Ziptel. They have developed a Android 2G VOIP app targeting the developing world. [approaching 500k dowloads after a week]
They have just released an Android app. They will be releasing a Windows (phone) app before an iOS app.
Edited 2015-06-26 23:49 UTC
Not particularly suprising. Anyone with only 2G service is unlikely to own an iPhone. That said in their own announcement they say iOS coming in Q3 2015 and make no mention of Windows phone, so I think that part you made up.
It is because Indians purchase 50x more Android phones than iPhones.
The iPhone is now largely irrelevant outside the English speaking world.
Ehm, tried looking at their sales numbers in China?
Yep. Apple had a one-off sales boom due to new models, Chinese New Year and a massive 4G rollout by China Mobile. They still only managed to sell 19 million phones in a market of 1.5 billion people.
Xiaomi managed sold 2.1 million phones online in 12 hours with no stores and no carrier tie-in.
Edited 2015-06-28 08:57 UTC
I’m currently in a relatively poor part of the Middle East. Two years ago it was all Samsung.
Now I see lots of iPhones. One of the major carriers is selling plans with the iPhone 6+ cheaper than a Galaxy S6. To many here, Samsung is yesterday’s news.
The people in the office where I’m doing an upgrade complain that they’d like a dual sim iPhone so that going to the next door state wouldn’t incur roaming charges where (just for info) Vodafone charges £2.00 a minute to call the UK. Talk about price gouging. It is little wonder that I do everything on Skype.
Of course the plan with the Galaxy S6 will be more expensive. It is a newer phone that also blows away the iPhone on all hardware specs and has been universally well received (except for batterylife).
Your comment shows the bias: Apple charges the most so their phones must be the best.
Reality is: Samsung charges more because their phone is better (at least until it’s Apple’s time again with the 6S)
(disclaimer: Nokia 1020 user)
Developing apps for Android is a terrible experience considering the varying types of displays. Apple has an advantage because it’s easier to churn out apps when you only have to test for a couple different resolutions.
Also, someone mentioned that though Android eclipses iOS in terms of app downloads, there is much greater potential for revenue if you were to develop iOS apps ( http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/revenue-gap-between-ios-and-androi… ). The difference is absurd.
That being said, one day everyone will realize that developing for Windows Phone with Visual Studio is the ultimate developer’s experience.
Perhaps the ultimate developer’s experience, but obviously not the ultimate consumer’s experience.
Have you tried a Windows phone? The user experience is far better than iOS or Android.
Windows phone lacks good apps. Also the same apps on windows phone is much more buggier and crappier than their android counterparts
I totally agree. Having tried to program for all three, Visual Studio is superior and Windows phone is the most fluid, logical experience. iPhone just has a wierd interface…no back button? Kind of reminds me of a Mac with one mouse button. Does Apple omit basic functions just to be different? Android, even after all of the phones released and revisions, is still a hot mess with apps that are just OK.
Is going to eventually change the landscape for app development on all platforms.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 925) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537
Reminds me of “Nucleus” from “Silicon Valley” TV show. It was far and beyond a second rate platform, I wrote a little funny post here about it: https://moonshot.re
I think that iOS is still the platform of choice for any developer who wishes to monetize their app fast and actually get paid. Android apps pay poorly and most users expect them to be free.
The US is very culturally diverse. We are also constantly bombarded with how America differs from everywhere else in the world. Yes, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all US-based companies but they do business on a global scale. To suggest that either Americans or these American companies hold a US-centric, or Anglo-Saxon (which is completely silly) view of the world is nonsensical & baseless. Wearing blinders prohibits the growth they’ve experienced, not promote it.
As others have already pointed out, there’s generally less cost in development & support, and better ROI on iOS. All it takes is simple math to solve the mystery.
Sorry but American companies have no fucking idea how the rest of the world thinks. They don’t even bother to make right hand drive cars despite 34% of people living in RHD markets.
You’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than that if you want to convince anyone.
Edited 2015-06-28 15:59 UTC
I travel to Australia frequently and can tell you for a fact that Ford, Jeep-Chrysler, and GM (Holden) absolutely do make and sell right-hand-drive cars.
RHD = Not Worth the Investment
We know how the “rest of the world works”. That’s why we are better at making money. As long as there is a demand, we will continue your supply.
Have you even been to America? We can’t help it that you drive on the wrong side of the road!
I own a software company that develops for both platforms. All the apps are made for both platforms.
My observations are:
– language: Objectve-C is an ugly language, Java is slightly better. Swing is being tested, and this seems OK.
– IDE: Eclipse is little bit bloated and slow, Xcode is better but Android Studio really blows the rest away. Very smart move from Google to get the guys from Jetbrains in
– API: not really a preference. Both platform have their strong and weak points
– device support. Here iOS is clearly the winner, less supported versions of iOS, with less impact and less devices to test. This is Androids biggest nightmare.
– releasing the app. the Google developer console is definitely easier to use than iTunesconnect. And getting your app approved by Apple is a lottery game. The most frustrating part is that you never know when the first version of your app will be available. It is impossible to plan any marketing activities. This is Apples nightmare.
– the app store vs play store. From a developer point of view, the play store is better. People do find your app much easier. You need an itunes client to download an app from the app store and the search function in iTunes is pretty weak. Both points give a minus for Apple.
– market share. My apps are currently only released in Europe and # of downloads is around 50-50
– making the money. We haven’t developed any paid apps, but we do have apps with in app purchases. the spending in iOS is slightly higher. Of course this might change when I open my apps to other continents
Recently, we have made 2 apps with Cordova iso the native development environment. Cordova cuts the development effort by 60% and the biggest win is that one can use responsive web design to overcome the devices fragmentation in Android. And it has a very big bonus, if one needs a web based version for the desktop, big parts of the app can be reused. But it might not be appropiate for CPU intensive apps like games. For Cordova based apps, the nightmare of Android is reduced to a bad, manageable dream, while Apples nightmare is still kicking my head
Edited 2015-06-28 09:34 UTC
Even if most companies are from US, the developers are from all around the world. As much as they would like to port their apps to multiple platforms, it takes very much time to do so and well, the budget and resources are limited.
iOS still brings the most money (because well, whoever has the money to buy into Apple ecosystem, does not look back for paying a couple of bucks for good apps) while on Android the situation is very different unfortunately.
If it’s not the unwillingness of people to pay for apps because they have crappy Android devices, it’s of those that have high end phones prefer to install payed apps from “other” sources simply because they can.
Thee are many good apps on Windows Phone, but most of them are from enthusiasts and are very hard to find. Companies don’t hare interest in this because it’s too expensive right now to consider a third platform (it’s not that they do not have available .NET developers willing to do this).
There’s also the fact that some developers say they fell in love with xCode and the way you can develop apps on a MacBook, but I think this is of personal taste.
Myself I can’t stand OSX and would prefer at any monet Visual Studio and/or any decent Debian distribution to do some coding on.
It may as well be .. Hey we learn to like xCode just thinking about the amount of money we can make from it, comparing to others, but this is just my opining so not exactly relevant.
Edited 2015-06-28 09:36 UTC
It’d be great if American companies finally started getting their acts together too. Don’t assume that veteran iOS developers are automatically also good Android developers (they’re not), and hire real, proper Android developers. I translate English to Dutch, and my clients would never ask me to translate, I don’t know, Spanish documents into Dutch. Small indie Android developers have proven that, even if it may be a little harder, it’s perfectly possible to create Android applications that are just as good as, and often even better, than their iOS counterparts.
In 2015, there’s no excuse for releasing lousy, crappy Android applications. You only have yourself to blame.
Thom, this is an assumption that I’ve seen you make a few times. It’s silly to blame the quality of Android apps on iOS developers.
Most developers tend to be either iOS or Android, and many of them are strongly and emotionally biased towards their chosen platform. You think that the so called power users can be passionate about their platform? Try the developers, the people who actually make a living coding for the platform. You’ll have a hard time hiring iOS developers to work on Android apps, and vice versa. Companies actually do give Android projects to “proper” Android developers. Because, like you pointed out, it makes too much sense to do so.
To me it seems IOS apps are done first as a matter of practicality. You have fewer device variations to test and code for. Compared with Android there’s less layout issues and version bugs to account for.
Also it’s a matter of tooling. Apple has had quite a while to get their tooling perfected for IOS/Apple developers. Android’s tooling before Android Studio was nightmarish to set up. It was very possible to get a good working system set up but always seemed like a gamble to update. It seemed like an update would always break something in eclipse. Thankfully there’s now Android Studio which puts the development environments on par with each other.
But that now leads to the biggest problem. The dev environments may now be equal but the whole app market has matured and is in a different era from just a few years ago. Similar to what happened on Windows PCs with apps and shareware people now look for something free or low cost first. The days of throwing an app in a store and hoping it catches on is over.
Developers need to go back to learning how to market and target there apps to a specific audience. This involves researching who your users are and targeting them if you want to make money from them. Despite the platform. People still pay for apps on PCs and they will still pay for an app on the phone. That is if it actually meets the needs of the user it was meant for. You can’t rely on getting noticed through the store. You have to work that for yourself.
Edited 2015-06-29 01:00 UTC
I came late to the party, yet most comments still miss the point on iOS vs Android.
So people still develop for iOS first, because that is where the money is, so it seems.
Well in countries like Portugal, almost everyone is on Android and feature phones. The ones wealthy enough to get an iPhone end up jailbreaking them and install pirated applications.
Eastern Europe countries have similar situation.
So targeting iOS first will bring back no money in those countries.
So you think the point of iOS vs Android is one of piracy affecting returns… O…k.
I work for a large US corp. We really wanted to release for both platforms at the same time, but we’ve had a terribly hard time hiring good Android devs. We were able to find good iOS developers very quickly. And we have a pretty good relocation policy, so we’ve not just been hiring in the local market, but flying people in globally for interviews.