Mika Mobile's Android experiences →
There’s a lot of anecdotal “iOS vs. Android for developers” stories out there, but this might be the best one I’ve seen because you don’t get the impression the author is rooting for one side to “win.” This is a textbook definition of a backhanded compliment, though:
Battleheart for Android has become a meaningful source of revenue, and has proven that the platform isn’t a waste of time. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that a polished, high quality product is more likely to be embraced on Android than on iOS because the quality bar on the android market is so pathetically low.
His main criticism of the Android Market actually has to do with the mechanics of selling and support. In exchange for Draconian Control™ Apple handles all the billing issues for you, but Google makes you responsible for those. And apparently the AM has “innate technical problems” which cause installation issues for one or two percent of the buyers. (I do wonder how much of that is user error, mind you—reading reviews on Apple’s app store makes one suspect that some people have the innate technical problem of being idiots, which not even Google and Apple working together could address.)
They do make some interesting observations about “fragmentation” which are in line with what I’ve suspected about it for a while—namely, that it’s mostly a matter of adjusting application displays to differing screen resolutions. That may be a challenge at times, but it’s not like it’s a brand new dilemma in the computing field that nobody’s developed strategies for dealing with before. (I actually suspect what critics describe as fragmentation among Android devices is a purposeful strategy, but that’s a separate topic.)
