Titanium Community Questions & Answer Archive

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Android App Development - is it worth the time?

Greetings Guru's,

I'm finishing up my first app and I'm currently waiting for the apple enterprise developer credentials to clear, which I'm assuming could take awhile becasue we've sent them everything about our business. I've nearly completed the android side of our app, but I've run into something interesting that I wanted clarification on from the seasoned professionals here.

With hundreds different flavors of the android running around is it worth it to produce apps on limited budget? We're really excitied about producing apps for the iphone and ipad, but our eyebrows get raised at the possible tech support side that may come with the android development.

I'm interested in hearing your stories about android development.

Thank you for your time in reading this.

O and thank you appcelerator for such a wonderful product.

— asked October 14th 2010 by Joe Irvine
0 Comments

5 Answers

  • What hundreds of versions ? There's 1.5, 1.6, 2.1 and 2.2 …

    — answered October 14th 2010 by Alan Bourke
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    2 Comments

    • Depends what Joe is referring to. There is literally hundreds of versions if you could all the different telco branded flavours, although that shouldn't affect anything.

      Joe could be referring to the different screen resolutions? That seems like the most daunting part of getting a graphics heave iOS applications working on Android.

      As for whether it's worth it. It really comes down to how much your time is worth. You might be surprised and it could all go smoothly and quickly, on the other hand it could be a huge headache.

      Cheers,
      Angus

      — commented October 14th 2010 by Angus Peart

    • Looking at the original report 100+ of the 108 varieties listed are weirdo custom builds and 99% of the users were using a standard build.

      — commented October 22nd 2010 by Alan Bourke

  • http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/10/14/1458200/Devs-Grapple-With-100-Versions-of-Android

    "The scale of the challenge facing Android developers has been laid bare by Twitter client TweetDeck. During beta testing of its new software, TweetDeck encountered more than 36,000 testers using an enormous pool of 244 different handsets. Not only was hardware for the platform fragmented, but Tweetdeck had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android, highlighting just how muddled the market is for the open-source platform. The splintering of Android is making life difficult for app developers. 'It's not particularly harder to develop for Android over iPhone (from a programming standpoint),' said Christopher Pabon, a developer who writes apps for both the iPhone and Android platforms. 'Except when it comes to final quality assurance and testing. Then it can be a nightmare. (a manageable nightmare, mind you)."

    — answered October 14th 2010 by Joe Irvine
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    0 Comments

  • I would develop SPECIFICALLY for Android, but since most of Titanium is cross-platform, I'd go ahead and publish to the Marketplace.

    — answered October 14th 2010 by Josh Lewis
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    0 Comments

  • I would develop SPECIFICALLY for Android, but since most of Titanium is cross-platform, I'd go ahead and publish to the Marketplace.

    — answered October 14th 2010 by Josh Lewis
    permalink
    0 Comments

  • I would develop SPECIFICALLY for Android, but since most of Titanium is cross-platform, I'd go ahead and publish to the Marketplace.

    — answered October 14th 2010 by Josh Lewis
    permalink
    0 Comments
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