Why I Will Never Develop for iOS
In light of Apple recently being granted an injunction on the Galaxy Nexus, and all the rage that followed, I felt the inspiration to update one of my two ailing blogs. So, with that in mind, here are the reason why I, as a lone gun developer, will never develop for iOS.
Cost. Let's start with the most mundane. In order to develop for iOS the proper way, you must own a Mac. There is no way around it. The iOS SDK only exists for Macs. I, literally, do not have $1000 in any of my bank accounts. A new computer, much less a Mac, is nowhere near feasible at this time. Then we get to the cost to publish your app. To be a licensed Apple developer, it's $100 a year. And Apple takes a 30% cut of any sales you make (which has become the standard). So, assuming I sell an app for 99¢ and that I buy a 13-inch Macbook Air to develop it on (we'll say the base $1200 model, even though its specs are laughable), in order to make up for my initial investment, I need to sell 1858 copies of my app. And I need to keep selling 130 copies of that app every year after that to keep making a profit. So, what about Android? I am developing for Android, so how's that? Well, the Android SDK runs on every platform. Mac, Windows, Linux. (Yes, Linux. I do a good deal of development on Ubuntu Linux. More on that later.) So, I don't need to invest money in new hardware. So, how much does it cost to be a licensed Android developer? Just a one-time payment of $25. Yes, they take a 30% cut of any sales you make, but do you see how much lower that bar for entry is? Instead of selling 1858 copies to be profitable, I only need to sell 34! And if sales flatline after that? No biggie! I made my profit. I don't need to keep making sales after that. And that's only if you want to sell via the market, which leads to my next point...
No Walled Garden. If you want to sell for iThings, it's iTunes or bust. There is no alternate market. (Well, Cydia, but since that involves doing some hackery things to your iDevice, that's probably not something most people will see.) With Android, I can post my apps to alternate markets if I want to. I still have Handango bookmarked in Firefox, because the developer for this one voice-recording app I used to use to record my lectures didn't have access to selling paid Android apps in his country at the time. Amazon's gotten into this space pretty big recently, and their fees for posting to their store aren't too bad. (Okay, so it's still the same $100 a year, but the first year is free! That's how you hook them in!) Or, I could even make my own website to sell it if I wanted to. Heck, if I was so worried about lawyers that I never wanted to publish my app at all and just wanted to hand it out to my friends, I could! Just have the SDK make me an APK, and I can e-mail that to all my buddies. There's absolutely no way to do that on an iPhone. (Okay, Cydia again has something for that, but again... not something normal people do.)
Apple treats their devs poorly. For the longest time, the approval process for getting your app into the iTunes app store was shrouded in mystery. Nowadays, the guidelines are actually published, but they'll still reserve the right to reject your app for reasons not mentioned in the guidelines. Like they want to steal your app and claim it as their own. Google knows better than to abuse their devs. After all, they have the ability to take their business elsewhere.
Open Source. This one probably doesn't bother the non-developer types out there, but from I've heard, and this is second-hand, is that alot of the legal stuff that you agree to when you become a licensed Apple developer runs against the majority of most open source licenses. So what does that mean? That means if I've written something cool and want to share what I did with every other programmer in the world, I can't. Which means that if I need help with something I'm writing for an iThing, it's much harder to find examples to work off of. Possible, but harder. Meanwhile, Android is 99% open source. (That 1% is all of Google's proprietary apps that are licensed separately from Android itself.) They allow you to develop for an open source platform (Android) on an open source platform (Linux). They even have their own repository service for hosting open-source code! That's awesome.
I don't want to give money to a company whose business practices I don't agree with. This is just good common sense, honestly. The last three points are pretty much business practices I don't agree with, and while they've gotten better from the days of rejecting Twitter apps because of people on Twitter swearing, they still do so many things that I just can't get behind. From their whole "don't innovate, litigate" attitude to them spewing so much venom at Android and then blatantly copying their features, it's incredibly sad that they despise competition this much, and that the courts let them go as crazy as they do. And really... search was the deciding factor in that injunction? SEARCH?! You know what company makes Android? GOOGLE! The kings of search! Universal search was something my OG Droid had when I first got it 2½ years ago! Hell, even the Palm Pre had that crap well before then! I swear, why do we allow techno-illiterate people make the rules when it comes to technology?