Android vs. iOS: A Developer’s Perspective

From one of the developers of Whereoscope, a previously iOS-only location-tracking app for parents, a very favorable look at Android development:

Somewhere inside Apple, there’s a guy who is receiving untold, nay, unspeakable pleasures by inflicting on the development community a kind of suffering that is as acute as it is pointless. That pain comes in the form of a series of hoops that one is forced to jump through in order to turn your phone into a development handset. There’s provisioning profiles, ad-hoc builds, certificates, and countless screens that I clicked through, not really caring what they did, because they brought me closer to being able to run my code on my phone. On Android, you check one option in preferences. That’s it.

Garbage collection (Android has it, iOS doesn’t) is his biggest gripe.

★ Wednesday, 8 December 2010