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

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

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