My take on Android vs iPhone development

As a mobile application developer I would like to share my experience with iOS and Android so far. At the end of this post I will rate my developer experience with each of the OSs and announce my favorite mobile OS!

I began my mobile application development experience with iOS. Coming from a Java programming background venturing into the murky waters of Objective C was a bit scary at first (I'd never even heard of Objective C until I looked into iOS). All I knew when starting off with Objective C was that it was a language similar to C and C++. That meant having to deal with memory pointers and no one who is a fan of Java and its garbage collector likes meddling with pointers again. Fortunately iOS apps are built around the MVC (Model-View-Controller design pattern), which meant there were standardized ways for dealing with pointers, you just needed to follow some routines and rules. But it isn't always easy.

But once I had got the hang of Objective C syntax and the Apple iOS API, things became a lot more easier. My favorite part of iOS development was using Interface Builder. The latest version of Xcode has this interface designer built into Xcode and it makes designing great looking iphone apps a breeze! Some developers prefer designing their UIs programmatically because that allows them to reuse design code in multiple apps but using interface builder makes the task of UI design much faster! The iOS API has practically every UI widget you can want on an app already available. So that makes your UI design task so much easier. I personally think the iOS UI widgets are much prettier than the current android widgets. Maybe because Steve Jobs is more peculiar about UI design than the folks at Google. So in conclusion for my take on iOS development I would say that what I like about it is the ease with which I can develop better looking UIs.

As for Android development I started off here doing an experimental app (which is now on the Android Market!:) ). My biggest complaint when trying out Android development was that at the time I started off I didn't own an Android handset. This meant that I had to run all my code on the emulator. When I started developing I was using the android api8. And gosh did it have the slowest emulator ever! Thankfully Android has since then increased their emulator speeds. But its still much slower than running on an actual device. Unlike the iPhone simulator, which simulates an iOS environment running on Mac h/w, the Android emulator emulates the entire Android device enviroment (including the h/w enviroment : SD card size, memory capacity etc.). So you can't blame it for being slow. But as long as you forget the emulator and stick to using a device for running your code during development, you will have a much happier android dev experience:)

The next thing that bugged me when starting off Android development was their UI designer. I used Eclipse along with the Android plugin for development. And even the currently available plugin is quite disappointing when it comes to UI designing. If your first mobile dev experience was with Android then this may not be that big a deal. You will just learn to navigate UI design using XML and not complain about it. But if you were an Interface Builder fan switching from iOS development to Android then you will be thoroughly disappointed. Seems Android folks are developing a WYSIWYG editor for the eclipse plugin though, this should provide a better rival for Interface Builder. Also I would rate the currently available UI widgets in iOS as better than Android ones in terms of their design and also ease of use in the code. Those cons aside developing Android apps is a joy because you are dealing with Java here. If you have some development experience in Java then there is no more learning required. Best of all the garbage collector handles all the nasty memory management details for you.

So here's my final rating.. Please note that the ratings below are entirely based on my own personal evalution.

1. UI design
iOS - 9/10
Android - 7/10

2. Ease of setting up dev environment
iOS - 3/10 (you need to get a mac first! and buy an iphone too or just forget about it!)
Android - 10/10 (can be done on a pc running any OS. and all dev tools required are freely available over the interent).

3. Deployment
iOS - 6/10 (the process of deployment is so cumbersome and restricted. but on the plus side this ensures that your app is of the best possible quality. still i think Apple can do more to simplify the deployment process)
Android - 5/10 (deploying an android app to the market is a breeze. but this really lowers the quality of apps out there)

4. Developing for different devices
iOS - 10/10 ( fixed screen sizes.)
Android - 2/10 ( varying screen sizes. different device hardwares. compatibility nightmare!)

5. Development language
iOS - 5/10 (strange and repetitive syntax.)
Java - 7/10 (Java is easy to develop with but runs slower)

6. Available resources for developers
iOS - 7/10 (the NDA delays developers from getting the info they need to support upcoming iOS releases in their apps)
Android - 10/10 (opensource. hurray!)

7. Debugging
iOS - 4/10 (can be a total nightmare even with tools like NSZombie setup. write perfect code or suffer!)
Android - 9/10 ( except for the occasional system crashes which leave baffling messages android dev tools are quick to point out exactly where you made a mistake in your code)

Some simple arithmetic results in Android being placed as the winner with 7.1429/10 vs 6.2857/10 for iOS.

For more developer takes on Android vs iOS please see:

http://whereoscope.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/android-vs-ios-a-developers-perspective/

http://nfarina.com/post/8239634061/ios-to-android