Android vs iOS Development

Debashish kumar sahoo
3 min readMar 28, 2022

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Before making a deep dive into Android vs iOS, let’s discuss about Mobile App. Mobile app development is among the most steadily growing fields in software production. Since the surge in the number of mobile applications several years back, the demand for fast and convenient apps has been only increasing. Recent researches shows that 90% of the user’s mobile time is spent in apps and only 10% browsing internet (websites). In the e-commerce space the contrast is even more glaring. Mobile app users spend 201.8 minutes per month shopping compared to 10.9 minutes per month for website users.

So, Congratulations. If you are reading this then you must be into app development which is going to be very vast in the near future.

android vs iOS

Now lets have a look at the differences between them.

Development tools

IDE

Android developers utilize Android Studio, a proprietary tool introduced by Google. This integrated development environment has cross-platform support, high readability, a wide range of development and debugging features.

iOS developers, on the other hand, rely on the XCode tool. The Apple-backed solution provides a variety of bug fixing tools, supports the entire range of iOS devices, and is easy to get around.

Programming language

For iOS development we use swift and for Android we use either java or objective C. Coding in Java or Objective C is more clumsy with all that semicolon, curly braces. Swift style code is comparatively easier.

Cost

To push any of our apps to apple store we need to pay $100 per year, which is a kind of subscription for uploading apps. On the other hand Android is much cheaper which costs $30 and gives lifetime access.

Market Share

Android devices are now holding 74.4% of the global market share, which makes the future of Android app development extremely promising. iOS devices are getting cheaper and gaining more and more popularity due to their high performance and constant innovation. Overall, it’s not productive to base your iOS vs. Android app development choices on the future outlook since both platforms will not lose popularity within the next few years.

Security

Due to the complex process of application uploading and moderation, App Store is a safer source of apps than Google Play. There’s less risk to get tricked by a malware distributor. In case your app passed the App Store moderation, you can be fairly confident in its security.

However, it might take a couple of days for Apple to approve your app, while with Google you’ll wait only for a few hours. Although in both cases the app is reviewed manually, Apple has so many requirements and peculiarities regarding submitted apps that most probably you will initially spend quite a lot of time getting to know them and adopting your code.

By security, iOS raises the bar to a higher level than Android. By approval time, Google still works faster than Apple.

Conclusion

Making a choice between iOS and Android application development is not easy as both come with advantages and drawbacks.

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