[nestlequ1k]

Sure, Apple is trying to maximize profit. But how does that help me?

We're developers right? We need to find the market with the most potential. If I'm developing for a platform where the platform holder is laser focused on maximizing their profit, but not their marketshare... it seems like I've made the wrong choice.

I see a lot of iPhone devs (not you specifically) try to justify Apple's shrinking marketshare by saying it's fine since Apple is still taking the total profit in the industry. Either they've heavily invested their earnings into AAPL, or they're trying to pull any stat they possibly can to justify their platform choice.

[enraged_camel]

Simple: people who have the kind of income to pay a premium for Apple devices will also be more willing and able to pay a premium for good apps. There lies your profit. (Not to mention your costs will be lower since iOS ha no fragmentation.)

[akmiller]

> iOS has no fragmentation

I think the correct statement would be iOS has "less" fragmentation. They still have fragmentation though. Not only through the devices but also the version of iOS running on the device. It can get pretty hairy trying to maintain support for multiple iOS devices with versions of even just 4.3 and up.

[veemjeem]

If you think iOS is hairy supporting 4.3 and up, you probably have no experience supporting Android apps. The fragmentation extends beyond the Android version. The differences between handsets are so big that one pretty much has to ignore the users who own phones that are impossible to test with. You'll get some random complaint from a user running your app on a device from a manufacturer you've never even heard of.

Look at Google's own wallet app -- it only runs on only 6 android devices. If you want to run google wallet on your Nexus S, you'll have to run a 3rd party "hacked" version of Google Wallet.

[magicalist]

Google wallet is a really poor example of fragmentation that a developer would run into since it has nothing to do with varying hardware and drivers, it's the carriers that are blocking it and (AFAIK) there's no reason that a developer would care whether or not the app itself is there. The hardware is accessible; Verizon and AT&T will use it for their own attempt at a payment system. That whole situation isn't really analogous to any other fragmentation you might encounter.

Android development and testing really isn't all that painful, and most of the new APIs you might miss are backported and available for the more prevalent Gingerbread and now ICS.

[myko]

I've certainly had issues supporting iOS 4 vs 5/6. Most of the Android issues I run into have to do with WebViews behaving differently on different OEMs devices. Both forms of fragmentation can be a pain in the ass.

Probably games developers have it harder on Android, but for the average app it seems just about the same to me as a developer.

[shinratdr]

The key difference is if you cut out iOS 4 only users you're eliminating at most 2-3% of your market. If you were to try and do the same thing with Android and require ICS or higher you would be blocking off 50%+ of your market.

There is little expectation of iOS 4 support at this point, because users who purchased an iPhone in the last 4 years don't have to use it. The same is hardly true for Gingerbread. Most of the phones that shipped with that half-baked OS will have it until they're retired into a drawer somewhere.

[clarky07]

it does have some fragmentation with the new screen size, but supporting iOS versions is a dream compared to android. 85% of my users are on iOS 6 already and 98.5% are on 5 or greater. You can easily drop support for 4.xx and below, and it wouldn't hurt too badly to drop support for 5. Try doing that on android.

[taligent]

Actually I think the correct statement is that iOS has such little fragmentation (in comparison to Android) that it is effectively zero.

Every developer can safely target iOS 5. With Android it is still 2.3.

[akmiller]

Well that hasn't been our experience. We've dealt with many issues and we've had customers from 4.3 up to 6.0. Not to mention devices from 3GS and the original iPad up to the latest. I haven't done any Android applications yet but I can imagine it would be worse if you wanted to target a large base of users (I will be gaining that experience rather soon).

[bookwormAT]

> iOS has no fragmentation

iOS is fragmentation. Android exists because 10 years ago, every mobile vendor was making his own incompatible operating system. So a developer had to make 300 different versions of his app to reach his audience. That was impossible, so there was no market for mobile apps.

Today, there are still 300 different devices, and maybe a 100 different operating systems. But because ~95 of these are based on Android, you can write a single cross-platform software that runs on all these systems. Android was build to defragment the market, and it was a huge success.

It might not work perfectly, but adapting your App to some strange behavior in some fancy Android device is still a lot less work than making a whole new app from scratch!

The only interesting OSes that you have to write everything from scratch for today are iOS and Windows Phone. These two systems are, unlike all the others, not compatible with each other and require a significant amount of extra work. And that is called fragmentation.

[kemiller]

I think it's more nuanced than that. If Apple customers are more affluent than average, and/or more willing to spend money on apps, then it continues to be a great market even if the sheer volume is lower.

If you're making something that you give away for free and make money on the volume of participants somehow, then Android is probably a better bet at that point, but if that's your strategy you probably want to target everything.

[bane]

I agree, potentially less money in the consumer's pocket is less money they can spend on my product.

I wonder how the mix of average money spent on iphone vs android apps per consumer has changed?

Or at the very least, total dollars spent on apps on each platform?

[briandear]

But the cost-conscious consumer is typically less inclined to buy apps. This thread is relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2929612

[cloudwalking]

> We're developers right? We need to find the market with the most potential.

Are you optimizing for making money, or for making impact? There's no right or wrong platform (iOS or Android), it just depends on what your goals are.