Devs Bet Big On Android Over Apple's iOS 328
CWmike writes "A majority of mobile app developers see Android as the smart bet over the long run even as they vote for Apple's iOS in the short term, according to a survey conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC. The survey polled more than 2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native apps. Of the 2,300 polled, 59% said that Android had the 'best long-term outlook,' compared with just 35% who pegged Apple's iOS with that label. But three out of four said that iOS offers the best 'near-term' outlook, with 76% tagging Apple's operating system as the best revenue opportunity."
Re:woowoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not really a surprise considering it is the only mainstream open platform not tied to any particular hardware.
Sampling bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
So among cross platform developers, just over half said one platform was better than another.
Talk about sampling bias. This just in, 70% of AppleInsider users think iOS is great, and 99% of lactose intolerant people think Ice Cream suck
big deal.
Asking The Undecided? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't this effectively a survey of people who are undecided? After all, isn't that why they're using a cross-platform kit rather than writing right to Android/iOS?
I would think looking at the developers who have firmly committed themselves to a platform as a better metric. The uncommitted developers have nothing to lose.
Re:PC Clone Wars Redux (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple obviously never thought of that.
Re:woowoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:woowoo (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like those evil retail stores. I hear they buy the product for less than they sell it!
Re:Sampling bias? (Score:3, Insightful)
So their whole sample for this survey is a small group of users who are *already* using a cross-platform compiler.
Far from newsworthy this is misleading and bogus. Thanks, Slashdot.
Re:That sounds about right.... (Score:1, Insightful)
The "community" can KMA, I write code to make money.
Re:That sounds about right.... (Score:3, Insightful)
In your idealized society, you think he should be paid based on... how many hours he worked? Your hybrid economic system removes both the altruistic motive of communism and the reward motive of capitalism.
So you've invented the worst economic system possible. Congrats!
Hmm. So when a plumber comes to fix the hot water tank, I should pay him based on how many hours he saves me heating water manually on the stove over the course of owning my home?
When a mechanic replaces a snapped timing belt he should be paid based on how many man hours he saves me walking to and from work over the next several years?
Fascinating world you want to live in.
Shouldn't some of the 100k apple devs be included (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow im shocked, developers that are trying to cater to both and likely started on the android hope android wins. I have no leanings either way, imho they both have their pluses and minuses but if your going to do a survey should people that are actively involved in a platforms development beyond a cross compiler be at least sampled? This reminds me of the AdMob survey back in march that claimed 70% of iPhone developers were jumping ship while surveying only 108 hand picked participants, oddly enough it was the same week that Apple announced it had passed 100,000 licensed developers. I've been dabbling with android itself, but frankly until they can get their act together (3-4 different versions in the wild, poor upgrade paths from oem's, google denying marketplace to non-phone devices) I really don't think Apple has much to worry about. Yes Apple is draconian as hell in their licensing, contracts and at least IMHO rather greedy on the profit sharing but at least there is some organization and direction.
Re:PC Clone Wars Redux (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think your memory is very accurate. I think you are confusing the Lisa with the slightly later Macintosh product line. I don't think Jobs had any hand in the Lisa product.
Were "hackers" ever their "core audience"? Business had long embraced the IBM PC by the time the Mac was available - that market was "lost" during the Apple II days.
Lawsuits are often of little value, but the licensing agreements between Apple and MS were certainly vague over MS's use of various Apple IP and it is certainly was not clear that either side would have eventually prevailed if they had not gone to court and then finally settled all outstanding issues in 1997 when Jobs came back.
I don't doubt Apple does, and will continue to make business errors, but it is difficult to argue with their current success in terms of profitability and market value. If you feel that you know better than the "unwashed masses" (which isn't really that hard to do), I would suggest you short some Apple stock and make some money if your doom and gloom predictions turn out to be accurate.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
It's even less surprising when you read who they asked: "2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native apps".
Why doesn't the headline read "People who use cross compilers have a reason for that choice". Despite what the title suggests, my guess is that Appcelerator users aren't the majority of mobile developers.
Re:woowoo (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:That sounds about right.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Face it. If you're a Verizon customer, a Sprint customer, or a T-Mobile customer, then your only smart phone choice is... Android.
Windows 7 phones are still vaporware, and no one wants the soon to be unsupported Windows 6.5. Blackberry failed to up their game significantly, and it shows. Palm's WebOS was a non-starter.
So what's left on the shelf? Android.
The way I see it, the majority of the people who're buying Android aren't "choosing" Android.
Walk into a Verizon store, or Sprint store, or T-Mobile store, and the only viable options available are Android phones. Faced with no real choice, customers examine a couple of nearly identical plastic phones for a few minutes, find the same set of features on each... and then proceed to buy the cheapest one.
Hence Android's sales growth.
What will tell the tail is the day AT&T loses its exclusivity agreement, and the iPhone hits Verizon...
Re:That sounds about right.... (Score:2, Insightful)
You get to burn in hell with actors, strippers, whores and professional athletes.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shared libraries are a big key (Score:3, Insightful)
I think with (b) the poster is talking about the totally idiotic way you move files between applications on iOS.
Say I have a text file created in one Application and I want to open it with another to do some formatting then open in again in the original application. On a sane system I'd have some sort of file browser I can use to locate the file. On iOS you have to send a copy to the other application, modify it, hope it knows about the original application so it can send it back, send back another copy of the file. It's a huge mess. It means you only ever bother to get documents onto iOS devices to view them and never bother trying to edit them there for fear you'll never be able to keep the dozens of eventual copies in order.
Even iOS applications that have native support for WebDAV manage to screw up and make duplicates of things all the time. The iWork apps on iPad are great examples of this. You wan't to work on something on a WebDAV share? Sure, here's a copy. You want to save those changes back to the WebDAV share? Ok, I'll just make another copy....
I hope that at some point Apple figures out that everybody hates their iOS file swapping system and at least gives us a walled of file area that we can access via WebDAV or over USB. Applications should then just pick files from that common area rather than maintaining their own duplicates of everything.
Access to the root filesystem of the device would be even better but I know that's unlikely to happen.
Objective-C never was a developer lock in (Score:5, Insightful)
Objective-c is Apples attempt to co-opt developers
Objective-C never was a developer lock in, it is merely used by the API for the operating system. You have always been free to use C/C++ for your application's code. Whether the OS API is objective-c or C/C++ doesn't really matter, such calls are rarely portable to begin with as they are generally platform or hardware specific.
Re:woowoo (Score:4, Insightful)
It's obvious you can read and count from your user name, but do you understand logic?
"Apple has paid $1 billion to developers." - is a half truth. That's maybe why the editor of the article put in the full sentence:
"And Apple has paid out over $1 billion to app developers (their 70% cut fo all sales)." (spelling error preserved so you could get a hardon)
Apple didn't 'pay $1 billion to developers' cause they're such nice guys. They did so because that's what the developers had coming to them. To put it in the context that they did it for any other reason is faulty and/or misleading logic.
is 100% correct so don't get your panties in a bunch.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not really a surprise considering it is the only mainstream open platform not tied to any particular hardware.
You forgot Symbian..been around since 2002.
Re:Shared libraries are a big key (Score:3, Insightful)
If you let tho OS support user built shared libraries then how are you going to *safely* share them between applications?
Do you know what a shared library is and how they work on a unix-like system?
If I develop a poorly written application that allows the shared library to be modified, what happens to the safety and security of the system?
wtf are you on about? So your 'poorly written application' is loading shared library code, modifying it, then persisting it back to the filesystem and your OS is allowing such a thing to happen? I think not.
It would be nice if you would think about why these decisions would-be made, from a technical point, before you make these kinds of statements.
Sounds to me like you have no idea how the system even works yet you're making these ridiculous assertions.
not representative (Score:3, Insightful)
This does, of course, suffer from a self-selection bias. People who use a cross-platform compiler have already decided that they want to play in both fields. All this does is find out their reason why. Which is interesting, make no mistake. To round out the picture, however, you'd have to at least get the number of developers who target one platform exclusively or use other cross-platform tools.
With my own dabbling in iPhone development and a friend who does that plus android semi-professionally, my own take is that the iPhone "peak" is getting ever smaller, to get into the top apps that make money like a printing press is getting ever more difficult. However, people usually underestimate the long tail, which feeds quite a lot of developers. It's not as exciting, but it works well especially for small-time and indy developers.
The same goes for android as a whole. I don't see nearly the same exposure for any android apps as is common for top iPhone apps. Less peak, more long tail. There is a marked difference in willingness to pay, however. At this time, as far as I can gather from people I know, android development isn't very profitable. But the growth rate is good, so that may change.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That sounds about right.... (Score:3, Insightful)
In the UK the iPhone is available on all the major networks, yet Android phones still sell -- I don't know how well, I know a lot more people with Android phones than iPhones, but it's an unrepresentative sample.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:woowoo (Score:3, Insightful)
Objective C is part of the main development environment of OSX. It is the main development language of OSX. OSX is based on NeXT and that used Objective C in the development environment too.
C++ extensions were only added to OSX due to Adobe not wanting to rewrite all their applications. Apple have been trying to kill off the C++ API (Cocoa) for years.
On a mobile device you can't realistically have numerous runtime environments just because developers are lazy. Android only really lets you code in one language, a Java derivative (or rip off if you side with Oracle) with some potential for native libraries.
What do you have against Objective C? it's a really nice language to use and some of it's useful syntax features have been lifted and put in .NET 4. Things such as named parameters, so you can see the names and values of parameters to a method/function instead of just values.
Re:woowoo (Score:3, Insightful)
USERS paid developers over $1 billion, and Apple snatched over $300,000. Saying Apple has paid $1 billion to developers is like saying VISA has paid companies $1 zillion dollars.
Nice try, Steve Jobs!
No, users paid Apple and then Apple paid the developers. It's fundamental to how the App Store works.
Your post is like saying you directly paid MS for the Xbox 360 you bought at Fry's.
Re:woowoo (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure it's a decent number of apps given that there is something like a quater of a million apps, but its a small percent of the whole. These are also folks that broke the rules, not some innocent victim. Yes there are rare cases where an app is rejected for stupid reasons, but those reasons were spelled out in the dev agreement.
The sense of entitlement of some people these days is amazing. They agreed to the developer agreement, willfully break it, and then act shocked when they get their hand slapped. Then people come in here and say it's a 'HUGE' problem, knowing you created the problem. I hate to break it to you, but this is how business works. You don't get to write your own rules FOSS style when contracting with another business. The developer agreement is a legal agreement. You dont' get to change the rules on a whim. Shocking, I know.
I'm not surprised violations get through. There are over 200,000 apps in the store. When they find them, they remove them.
[Citation Needed]
There are, what, 12 core apps, each pretty specific in the function it performs. Apparently there are at least 200,000 other things you can do on the platform without bumping into that functionality. It doesn't seem that hard.
95% are compliant. Of the 5% that aren't, most knowingly broke the rules themselves. The others chose to delve into areas that are open to the whim of personal opinion, such as adult material, or 'obscene'. Guess what? If you design an little sticky notes app, chances are pretty rock solid it won't get banned for being obscene.
This isn't rocket science. Something those dev's who raked in a billion in cash have figured out. Don't try to cheat the system and you'll do fine. If you realize you can't pass up the chance to cheat it, then iOS is not for you.
It's really just that simple.
Re:woowoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Objective-c is Apples attempt to co-opt developers.
Really? I thought Objective-C was Brad Cox's attempt to create a message-passing object-oriented extension to C in the manner of Smalltalk.