iOS vs android

thumbs07 · 06-16-2017, 12:42 AM

This article reckons iPhone is at the forefront of gaming for time to come:

http://gizmodo.com/when-it-comes-to-gaming-the-iphone-will-always-stomp-t-1767701278

Quote:

Because mobile games are made for iOS first. Android is an afterthought—even though Android continues to crush iOS in terms of smartphone marketshare.

Developing for iOS tends to be more lucrative overall, and there’s very little device fragmentation. There are just a handful of processors and screen sizes that an iOS developer needs to program for, which means devs can optimize their apps better than the poor Android developer who has to take into consideration hundreds of different devices with a wide variety of processor and display capabilities.

Incredibly annoying when you want to punish Apple for their procedures- that regardless they are the forefront of mobile gaming.

dancj · 06-16-2017, 04:39 PM

To a degree, their procedures are the reason they're at the front of mobile gaming.

thumbs07 · 06-17-2017, 12:24 AM

Yeah possibly.

Retr0-MD2 · 06-18-2017, 08:36 AM

Between Android and IOS, I think they have their own strengths and weaknesses, whereas IOS is more profitable for developers so most games flock to IOS first.

Being on both sides of the field, some games have free trials on Android, but not IOS. IOS has more games, but Android is more robust, such as button mappers you can use to add physical controls to any game, like Shadow Fight 2, which plays light years better with physical controls. I guarantee Lynx won't be as hard with physical controls, lol!

Captain_Mario · 06-19-2017, 01:54 AM

Both of them are great, but most developer that develop a paid game preferring IOS because it is safer from any pirate. In Android you could install any pirate app without needed to root their phone, but this is not happening in IOS where there is tough process to get fully control on your system and not majority of user can do it. That is why IOS is safer environment for the developer.

crazychimp · 06-19-2017, 05:11 AM

Plus with iOS there's only a small number of hardware/OS versions to develop for. With Android there are so many different types of devices running different version of Android it make building quality apps much more difficult.

Nullzone · 06-19-2017, 05:29 AM

Didn't want to comment here (would end up with like a 2-page post

), but crazychimp's comment is an invitation to whip out the graphs and statistics:
Here's something from Google itself: https://developer.android.com/about/...rds/index.html
This one is old (from 2010, didn't find a recent one right away), but the fundamentals behind it still apply: http://stephenslighthouse.com/wp-con...martphones.png
For extra fun, here's my favorite one: ~4000 different Android devices on record, and that number is only going up. I saw the same one for 2016 with ~6000 if I remember right, but can't find it anymore.
Android device fragmentation, understatement of the year

thumbs07 · 06-28-2017, 01:44 PM

I'm not so sure about this argument about number of devices as I think android has maybe started standardising itself- whereby people flock to the Samsung s6,s7,s8 if they want an iphone rival. I maybe wrong though, I didn't buy topend android.

One thing I have discovered. Radiangames is on android, but no longer on IOS! Not sure the reason of that.

Jean pierre · 07-02-2017, 04:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thumbs07

I'm not so sure about this argument about number of devices as I think android has maybe started standardising itself- whereby people flock to the Samsung s6,s7,s8 if they want an iphone rival. I maybe wrong though, I didn't buy topend android.

One thing I have discovered. Radiangames is on android, but no longer on IOS! Not sure the reason of that.

good to hear, I will certainly buy again the Radiangames games when I switch to Android. Despite the fortune I gave to Apple, it is my last year with Apple because I can't stand anymore being trapped in a "safe" place without any control on my stuff. Since the day Jay Freeman said the jailbreak is dead I don't see what could make me stay on IOS. Apple went too far with the 32 bits holocaust.

ackmondual · 07-05-2017, 01:25 AM

I made a post I made in May 2014...

Quote:

As of July 2013, I went to several Google developer meetings. The inside scoop I got about fragmentation was: Fragmentation on Android is mostly a thing of the past. Sure, it still exists, and iOS has it better, but it's hardly the same concern it was years ago. This coming from 2 separate Android devs.

A large part of it is because of the migration to Android 4.x. One, it streamlines development for everything. Before, you needed to deal with 2.x for phones, and 3.x for tablets. Another is the dev tools and kits for 4.x are much better.

Well, what about all of the users still on pre-4.x version of the OS? One stat was as of that meeting (back in July 2013), over 50% were on 4.x (as of this post, May 2014, it'd be even greater). If you wanted to only develop for 4.x and leave out 2.x and 3.x, it'll save you a good amount of hassle without alienating too many folks.

If you can go say, 5% more work to make your app compatible with 2.x and grab 30% more share, then it may be worth it as was the case for one of the devs. Also consider that many users who are on Android 2.x probably got a free or $40 cheapie Android phone (WITHOUT CONTRACT) just to make calls, and perhaps do some texts and camera pics. These people weren't going to be spending $$ on your apps anyways, just like how on iOS, there's still a segment that's using an Iphone 3gs or 4 and aren't that into apps either.

Much of that is still holds true today. You can easily ignore a majority of those Android users since they weren't into games to begin with.

A mobile development podcast mentioned that even though more people pay for stuff on iOS, there's still generally a culture of not paying for stuff. He's of the opinion that to have something sustainable, you need to have a subscription service, pay have some freemium model, or do premium pricing. Since devs couldn't charge for updates, we're not talking about tacking on a few more $'s to the price tag. Whatever you think you should charge, you need to up that by a factor of 5 (since iOS AppStore doesn't let devs charge for updates, and that was mostly a BS policy anyways). With the premium pricing, you won't find much of that in the gaming world. Enterprise and business software... clients will pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for those since it saves hundreds to thousands of man hours per year. There's so much free/cheap entertainment within the iOS App Store, and even more when you consider other forms of entertainment that it's too saturated.

Last but not least, while Monument had a 95% piracy rate on Android, there was still a majority of piracy on iOS too, at 60%.
monument-valley-apparently-has-a-95-piracy-rate-on-android-60-on-ios-285851

Despite that, they say fit to make a sequel, although TBF, it's only on iOS, with only mention from articles saying an Android release is "soon".