Having experience developing on both iOS and Android I'd say that, hands down, iOS is a nicer dev environment to work on. There are a whole host of reasons why a developer would pick iOS over Android:
1) Less fragmentation. It's actually getting slightly worse with iOS now that the number of devices has increased however it's nowhere near as bad as Android. As mention above, developers have been dealing with PC fragmentation for years but - when you're a small developer - it's best to pick your battles wisely. Not only that but Android had less support for things such as asynchronous gaming. With iOS it's all there for you. Apple really do supply a pretty well featured envionment for games dev. 2) The Android dev environment isn't that great. Caveat - I come from a C++ background but know some Java. However, having to integrate the two within a project can be a pain. Plus Xcode, out the box, is much better to devlop for that the Android environment which, if I'm being honest, feels like a somewhat unprofessional "homebew" solution. 3) There's an app size restriction with Android and you have to implement this weird, two stage process to get around it which is a pain in the backside. Anything over 50MB (i think) and you have to go down this route. Not fun. 4) Research has shown that there is a greater % of paying users on iOS. Of all the Android devices out there, a significant number are low powered phones which are going to barely run anything outside the basic installed apps (e.g mail, etc.). Plus a significant number of these people do not want to play games. With iOS you've got an environment that has a healthly range of games. This in turn attracts the kind of people to who wish to download and play games which in turn draws more game developers. Vicious circle. If you wish to play games, iOS is currently the best way to go. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BGG Down" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/bgg_down?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
