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Originally Posted by ApK
As I am in process of learning both iOS and Android development, I will add:
There are more hurdles to getting started in iOS development than Android development.
1. You need a Mac
2. You need to know Objective C which is not a particularly easy language to learn, and is not used much outside the Apple world.
3. You need to pay money for an Apple dev account to make stuff publicly available in the App store.
By contrast,
1. The Android dev environment is available for just about any system...Windows, Mac, Linux.
2. Android dev is done in Java which has an easier learning curve, and is already to familiar to a very large pool of devs.
3. Anyone can make an .apk that can be distributed to end users. I think devs need to pay to get in the Play Store or the Amazon App Store, but .apks do not NEED to be distributed through those sources, since Android supports side loading. iOS devices would need to be jaillbroken to sideload.
So devs need to be a bit more serious before trying to offer an iOS app to the public.
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I'd say that's a pretty fair summary.
A couple of points to add, however:
- I wouldn't necessarily agree that Objective C is hard to learn. It's a nice mix of C-style programming with Smalltalk-style OO. Any rounded programmer with a range of languages and language types under their belt should find it quite easy to pick up.
- I'd say that Objective C is, to me at least, an *advantage* of iOS. Having programmed professionally in both, I much prefer it to Java.
- It's not clear to me that "devs need to be a bit more serious before trying to offer an iOS app to the public" is necessarily a disadvantage to the consumers of those apps!
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(BTW, Apple is releasing a new, more Java-like, language for iOS development called Swift. I'm looking forward to that.)
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Swift looks very nice, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as Java-like. It's a much more modern, and IMHO much better, language than Java.
/JB