A successful mobile app can lead to millions of dollars in revenue from its creator. An unsuccessful app, on the other hand, can represent hundreds of hours of work for the development team that might produce little to no return. Although the analogy between app development and a casino is stretching things a bit, there is most definitely an element of luck involved.
That said, you can reduce the role of luck by minimizing the amount of time spent in actual development of the app. If there’s not a whole lot of original coding to be done, and/or you can pull together other pieces of already written code, you can dramatically reduce the development time required for the app. That means your team can crank out more apps in less time, upping the odds that one of them will be a hit.
Given that both the Apple / iOs and Google etc / Android universe are large and expanding, there’s plenty of money to be made selling to either market. The key question for app developers, therefore, is which ecosystem allows them to develop apps more efficiently?
Apple’s iOS apps trump Android in app development speed
App maker Infinium recently shared some data on its last six development projects for both iOS and Android, and some digging into the data showed that Android apps took around 30% more time and effort compared to iOS app development.
For example, it took 38% fewer lines of code on average for the iOS version than for an Android version with the same exact functionality. Not surprisingly, it took Infinium 28% more total hours of code-writing on average to complete the Android versions of dual OS projects.
Infinium notes the reason for the difference in development time is that Swift and Objective-C for iOS are less verbose than the older Java language Android applications.
The software developer also points out that it seems like Android emulators are typically slower than iOS emulators, and that Android’s use of XML for app layouts is not as simple as the WYSIWYG method for iOS.
Finally, all Android developers have to test their new code against the huge number of Android device configurations. Potential configurations include different screen sizes, pixel densities, varying hardware components and Android API levels relating to the version of Android.
App development experts highlight that device testing is much complicated and time-consuming for Android compared to iOS where the hardware is standardized to just a few handset models.
