[least]

Those are some great insights, thank you for sharing.

Android notably does have some good apps for making music on it. There's a version of Cubasis on Android, Koala Sampler is on Android, Google had Teenage Engineering build a music app for Pixels, and I'm sure there's many other apps that have found a way to make it work, though I know for a fact that Koala Sampler has had issues with input latency due to the audio stack on certain Android Devices (where it becomes unplayable).

Apple's done a lot of work to make it a viable workflow on iOS/iPadOS. inter-app audio, AUv3, actual support for tablets, and a good audio stack are just some of the things they've done to make it a real platform for musicians. Google would have to put in a lot of work to make Android at all attractive to musicians and frankly I don't even know if it's worth their time. Still, they can do it and they've done a fairly good job of improving the state of Android for visual arts on tablets, so it's not impossible. Just a lot harder.

[jclardy]

Yeah, I don’t see google ever having the incentive. Apple can onboard people with the far reach of iOS, and pull them into the Mac later on once they are hooked on audio products for iOS. With Android…you are a bit stuck as I don’t see ChromeOS becoming a center for audio production.

[chaosprint]

I have no preferences on Apple or Google. I use Mac and Android phone. But the Chrome team has spent lots of effort for web audio, especially the latest audioworklet api and wasm supporting gcfree rt audio. Yet on Safari their audio is way worse. Who knows the reason?

[tomduncalf]

Yeah that is a good point that it is possible to ship a pretty good audio app, but it requires a lot of work (especially testing) or you restrict it to eg. just Pixels. I can imagine Ableton surveying their user base, finding them quite Apple-centric and mainly iOS users (just a guess!) and deciding it wasn’t worth the potentially huge amount of extra work to support Android, at least for v1.

Google did introduce Oboe a couple of years ago which was a new, much improved audio API, so they have put in work there. But yeah, there’s nothing like AUv3 as far as I know and the whole ecosystem must be so far behind what exists on iOS that it would be hard to justify many devs putting in the work. But it is possible to ship cool stuff with work for sure!