What setup work? Install Xcode from the App Store, and log in with your developer account? There is less involved than just downloading and unzipping the Android SDK
There are steps to go through for android too. The original comment about deployment is false, and doesn't make any distinction about one time setup.
> That's also because deploying an APK on a test device (or several devices) is way easier than deploying an IPA on an iOS device.
False.
> it's easy to push the APK to my phone as part of the build process, and I don't even have to plug my device in to do so.
Also true of iOS.
If you want to make the case that enrolling in the developer program is a hassle, that's fine, but it's misleading to make it sound as though that is part of the build process.
No, you do not need any paid account in order to compile an APK and install it on any number of devices. I could paste a link to an APK right here, and if you were visiting it from your phone, you could install it directly from that downloaded file.
This works on any number of devices.
You need a Google Play Developer account in order to distribute through the Google Play store, but you can directly install an application on an unlimited number of devices for free without ever signing up for an account. This is not possible on iOS without jailbreaking every phone.
I'm not sure if it has changed since I last made an ios app a while back, but there was a fairly large amount of security certificate provisioning and the interface for it, at that time at least, was unintuitive.
- create provisioning profile(s)
- hit refresh in Xcode and hope it pulls in the profiles you want to use (maybe only an issue if you're a member of multiple teams)
- modify build settings
once you've done that its simple but there is definitely a setup overhead with Xcode and devices