“Based on my experience meeting hundreds of startup founders and VCs in both San Francisco and New York, few professionals in America’s tech hubs have owned an Android phone or believe in the opportunity of the platform,” Sandi MacPherson writes for Quartz.
“Android is not the preferred platform for new startups to build on,” MacPherson writes. “When you ask startups why they prefer to build for iOS first, the typical responses revolve around a few main points: Building for Android is more expensive and time intensive, mostly because of massive fragmentation in hardware and software; iOS users are much more valuable and monetize more than Android users; iOS is more popular in the US, and that’s the market most US-based companies know best. While Android is just under 85% worldwide, it’s only about 50% in the US.”
With any development team, you will always have a more familiar platform. This platform is your team’s bread and butter. You can make magic happen. No design or interaction is too hard. You feel infinite. You eke out morsels of performance by diving into system libraries and rewriting components. And then there’s the other platform. This mystery platform monetizes poorly and is used by poor people. None of your friends use it. None of the tech press, the people who you want covering you, use it. It feels like it’ll take another thousand hours that went into designing and executing the original iOS application. — Jong Moon Kim, Founder at YC Startup
Right now each revision of hardware and OS introduces huge new capabilities. Apple’s ability to tightly couple the hardware, the OS, and the APIs for developers to take advantage of that hardware is unprecedented. Just look at Bluetooth Low Energy—it’s been available on iOS since the iPhone 4S, and Android penetration is pathetic even today. Things like Metal, TouchID, and perhaps 3rd party access to NFC are examples of things that Apple can enable much more easily and broadly than Android. For developers that are pushing the limits of the technologies being introduced today, iOS is a much more attractive platform, while Android continues to play catch up. — Sutha Kamal, Founder & Former CEO at Massive Health
MuchRead more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
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