Sunday, February 20, 2011

Android vs iPhone development

I stumbled upon this article talking about the pros and cons of developing for the Android and iPhone platforms. It's an interesting read, especially if you've had some experience developing mobile apps. I agree with most of the points made in the article.

In the 2 months I've been working on j3wao, I've already encounter a bunch of the Android issues the article talks about. Probably the biggest complication we've hit so far is the huge disparity of device screen resolutions. Targeting all Android phones is a nightmare for this reason alone. Another major issue is the emulator. It takes something like 2-3 minutes to start up and load the home screen. Every operation on the phone is incredibly laggy, even basic things like doing the unlock slide. We might have a lot of issues testing our game on the emulator because of this issue.

Unfortunately, we are (realistically) stuck with Android-based development and testing for j3wao. While we plan to deploy to iOS devices, Android will probably be the primary target for development and testing. There's more financial commitment to developing for iPhone. At the very least, we need a $99 licence fee.  There's also the fact that we need Macs to develop and test on. This is a major inconvenience when we have 4 developers for this project. You get what you pay for, I guess.

1 comment:

  1. Regarding Android Development:

    1. You can leave the emulator running - you do not have to boot it for every compile.

    2. You can actually run/debug the application on YOUR android phone, rather than in an emulator if you wish (I believe so, anyway)

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