What platform to choose for development?
Well, you’ve come to conclusion to start developing mobile applications and can’t help doing it. The problem is it is quite difficult to decide what platform to choose for development. Both Android and iOS have their pros and cons and choosing one of them depends also on your personal feelings to Apple’s products or companies backing Android ecosystem.
In this post I’ll cover pros and cons of each platform and conclude with the comparison table. So lean back and enjoy reading.
Prerequisites for development
To develop for any platform be it Windows Phone or any other you’ll need all or part of the things below, depending on what you’ve already have.
- Internet access
- Computer
- Phone
- Developer Account
- Application Store registration
- Programming language
- Development framework
To get those things you’ll have to make certain amount of investment in advance but there is a price to pay even for developing for open source platforms.
iOS development
Prerequisites for development
Below I provide what you’ll need for iOS development including the price tag as of today 7/16/2016 in US
- Internet access ———–charges apply according to your cellphone provider
- Mac Mini ————– –$499
- iPhone 6 —————-$549
- iOS Developer account —–$99 every year
- Apple ID —————–need to provide a valid credit card
- Swit of Objective C ——– free of charge after setting up an Apple ID
- XCode —————— -free of charge after setting up an Apple ID
- Fan factor ————- –purely subjective feelings
As a rule of thumb Apple products are and tend to be expensive and there is no sign that in the future this trend will change. So taking this track for development will certainly be costly but if you already possess iPhone or Mac then you’ll spare the money.
I’ve only picked up the cheapest Apple products available as you can see because any Mac or iPhone except of mentioned above would cost you more money.
What I liked and not about iOS development
Recently I’ve participated in developing a number of modules in a security vulnerable mobile application for iPhone. It exemplifies a typical application that connects to a bank and has software security vulnerabilities built in to showcase capabilities of certain security company products.
Intuitiveness of OS X UI and speed of Swift
The development for iPhone happened on Mac Mini with latest OS X version and XCode with Swift. As a regular user of Windows I was very impressed by ease and intuitiveness of OS X and like it very much.
Developing in Swift was also very impressive and nice in comparison to developing in Java under Android Studio. Swift is a modern high level language that is more concise and powerful than Java 1.7 is.
No refactoring
As for XCode it was also nice to play with but lack of refactoring capabilities for Swift places it behind Android Studio that is based on IntelliJ with powerful refactoring capabilities built in.
Knowledge of under the hood libraries required
In comparison to Android development in iOS you’ll need to dive deep into operating system libraries to be able to develop iPhone applications. In contrast, developing for Android you do not need to know inner workings of operating system since Application Framework layer abstracting them for the developer.
Development resources
There are few resources when it comes to developing for iPhone and you’ll face hard times looking for working examples.
Android development
Prerequisites for development
Below I provide what you’ll need for Android development including the price tag as of today 7/16/2016 in US
- Internet access ———————charges apply according to your cellphone provider
- Any computer with at least 2GB of RAM —$199.00
- Any phone such as BLU —————$99.99
- Google Developer account ————-$25 once and for lifetime
- Java —————– ————–free of charge
- Android Studio ———————-free of charge
- Fan factor ————- ————-purely subjective feelings
What I liked and not about Android development
Take what you’ve got and get going
If you have an Android phone and any PC with at least 2GB of RAM you can start developing for Android right away. There is no need for any registration as long you want to run your application on your phone only.
Android Studio’s running anywhere
Android Studio that comes at no cost is powerful development environment that is intuitive and easy to use. In addition, in contrast to XCode that may be run only on Mac, Android Studio can run on Linux, Mac and Windows that makes it much more attractive option.
Developing fast
Due to wealth of tutorials, code example and entire applications available online it is very easy to proceed with Android development. It is possible to find almost any answer when there is a question during the development.
Development resources
There are plenty of resources when it comes to developing for Android
- Official Developers site pretty useful and thorough
- Tutorials Point invaluable site with detailed working tutorials
Conclusion
As you’ve seen from the price of development point of view Android is a platform to choose. But other considerations such as personal feelings and preferences are coming into way of cold logic. So decide for yourself and remember that after all every code is translated into ‘0’ and ‘1’ to run on a processor.
| # | Item | iOS Price Tag | Android Price Tag |
| 1. | Internet access | same | Same |
| 2. | Computer | $499 = 500 | $199.00 = 200 |
| 3. | Phone | $549 = 550 | $99.99 = 100 |
| 4. | Developer Account | $99 = 100 Multiplied by years | $25 Once for a lifetime |
| Total price | $1150 | $325 |
Do not miss
Check the post about neaapps because more games are coming.
| Reference: | Android vs. iOS Development from our JCG partner Andrei Cheremskoy at the GetToCode.com blog. |
Or you could use Codename One and get both with Java 8…
Thanks. Good point. It looks that Codename One for Java is like Xamarin for C#.
It’s a bit different, because if you want to develop with Xamarin you need to know the iOS API and Android API, because in this case C# it’s used as a “common language”, Xamarin (with the exception of Xamain Forms) does not provide you a “universal framework” for both platforms. Codename One instead, really permit you to write one codebase in way to have Android and iOS versions immediately. This is done because Codename One give to the developer a consistent framework for writing apps without the needs to know iOS API or Android API (except if you needs some… Read more »
Java is the answer to almost everything today and for the technology that is being conjured up for an exciting future.Thanks for sharing this.