I have been asked to participate in a panel. The panel will be a debate/discussion between mobile developers on which mobile platform is the best. I have been tapped for the iOS side. Leading up to tonight’s event, I have been jotting down my notes on the talking points I was given by my team. I have decided to post my notes for posterity. Each section title will be a question that I was given by the iOS team, followed by my notes. Enjoy.
What Problems with the iOS Platform Still Need to be Addressed?
I find that there are many developer APIs in iOS 8 that do unexpected things or are broken. I believe that Apple could probably use a development cycle to just clean up the platform and make it a bit more robust. I think it’s atrocious that Apple still offers flagship iPhone models with 16GB of storage. I don’t really care about expandable storage, but the fact that the baseline model comes with a paltry 16GB is ridiculous. I can’t recommend that device to anyone. I also feel that it’s time for Apple to increase the amount of RAM found in iPhones. New iPhone models currently come with 1GB of RAM. I honestly don’t see a performance hit from this in day-to-day operation, but there are times when I notice it (mostly when I have had Safari in the background for a while and upon returning to Safari, my open tabs reload since they are no longer in memory).
How Long Would it Take to Become a Competent iOS Developer? An Expert Developer?
I honestly feel that both platforms are fairly equal in the length of time it would take for you to become a competent or expert developer. There are so many great resources out there for both platforms (the developer documentation for each platform is top notch and you can usually always find an answer to your question on Stack Overflow, which has a very active community for both platforms). I think the community behind iOS development is probably larger at this time, but its fairly comparable. I think you can probably become a competent developer for either platform in 2-3 months. You can become an expert developer in a year. The key is to have someone who can review what you write to keep you honest and to ensure that you are observing good coding practices (specifically for that platform).
Where do You See iOS as Superior?
I feel that iOS is superior in a few different areas (although I’ll admit that some of those gaps are closing and some of the ways I feel iOS is superior are purely subjective). These areas are developer tools, the development language/system, user experience, and the camera.
Developer Tools
I feel that the developer tools that Apple provides are still better than the tools provided by Google. I believe Google has closed that gap significantly with Android Studio (IntelliJ users rejoice!). My first Android development experience involved Eclipse and, while Eclipse is what is is, it always felt a bit hackie to me. I feel Google is still lagging behind when it comes to user interface layout. The Interface Builder piece of Xcode is so easy to work with and what you see is pretty much what you get. I think Instruments is far and away better than any of the profiling tools provided to Android developers by Google.
Development Language/System
I believe the iOS development language du jour (Swift or Objective-C) is superior to Java. While language preference is purely subjective, there are some objective features where I feel like the iOS development platform is head and shoulders above the Android development platform. One of those is iOS’s Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) vs Android’s Garbage Collection. Garbage collection is an old idea that Android has implemented. It’s a methodology of reclaiming unused memory. It essentially scans the devices memory and determines which objects are currently being referenced and which objects are not. It then deallocates any objects that are not being referenced to reclaim memory (this is a very elementary example of how garbage collection works, so please forgive its crudeness). The issue with garbage collection is that it’s horribly inefficient. It’s slow (the length of the scan varies depending on the amount of memory in the system and how much of that memory is being used), requires more memory than other systems, and isn’t foolproof (it may be fixed by now, but I once knew of a way to guarantee memory leaks while writing Android code).
iOS has a thing called Automatic Reference Counting. ARC is not garbage collection (and to call it garbage collection is an insult). It’s a clever way of automatically managing your memory. It keeps track of how many references an object has (how many owners). When you reference an object, that object’s retain count increments. When you dereference an object, that object’s retain count decrements. Once an object’s retain count hits zero, it is released or deallocated. It is not foolproof, but it is definitely more efficient and requires less overhead.
User Experience
For my money, the iOS user experience exceeds that of Android’s user experience for the majority of users. On iOS, the only variability in user experience comes from the hardware. If you’re using an older device, your experience can be different than it would be on the latest and greatest hardware. Your experience can vary wildly on Android as you have different hardware manufacturers. Not only can your experience change based on the manufacturer’s build quality or the hardware specifications, but Android manufacturers are also able to “customize” (read: make it shitty) the operating system so that their devices may stand out amongst the numerous other Android devices on the market. You can, of course, install a different Android mod on your device. To me, that can be a bad user experience. I’m going to have a very difficult time explaining the steps of that process or why a person should even attempt to do that. Of course, I realize that one of the features or selling points of Android is the freedom for a more knowledgable user to customize his or her device. My opinion though is that the default experience that most users will have is a bad one. I doubt that first time, non-technical Android buyers are buying Nexus devices. I would guess that those first time, non-technical Android buyers are buying what the Verizon or AT&T sales person is recommending to them, which in many cases is an inferior product. I personally like the experience of stock Android Nexus devices. It’s just a shame that you can’t get that stock Android experience on most devices (it’s also a shame that Google no longer makes a normal sized device.
Camera
The last area where I find that iOS is superior is in the photos and the videos you can take with an iOS device. For my money, the cameras in iPhones produce better quality images than their Android counterparts. Android is closing the gap, but for the longest time I could usually take a look at two pictures (one snapped with an iPhone and one snapped with the leading Android device) and I could identify which one was captured with the iPhone and which one was captured with the Android device. Historically, pictures snapped with Android devices have always looked grainy or cloudy. When I’m at the park with my wife and son and I want to capture a moment, I’m never worried about getting a good shot with my iPhone. I know I’ll get a good shot with my iPhone.
Would You Ever Switch to Android? If So, What Would it Take?
I would possibly switch. I have used Android in the past as my daily driver. I just wasn’t “in love” with it. Certain components of the UI worked just differently enough (and, in my opinion, incorrectly) that it became irksome to use an Android device. I used a Nexus One (yeah, I’m one of the ten people who bought one of those). This was back in the 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 days (fro-yo for life!). Out of quite a few UX things that irked me, two still stand out in my mind: tap targets and that damn back button.
I never became comfortable with the default Android keyboard (I’m aware I could have installed a third party keyboard, but I’m not a fan of that; I haven’t even installed a third party keyboard in iOS 8). My keyboard theory is that the default iOS keyboard placed the touch targets somewhere below the key view (and these would dynamically resize based on what you were typing). It felt as though the Android keyboard placed the touch targets right on top of the key view. I’ve always heard that when we tap on touch screens that we are actually tapping slightly below where we think we are tapping, so this theory always made the most sense to me.
The back button, in Android, is such a wildcard. What does it do? The simple answer is that it literally takes you back an activity (to use Android terminology). The OS keeps a history stack and as you navigate around your phone, it adds entries to that stack. If you hit the back button, it simply pops the top activity (the one you are currently viewing) off the stack and the activity that is now on top of the stack is the activity you’ll see. I always found this unnerving because if you don’t remember your navigation history, you don’t really have a way of knowing where the back button will take you. iOS always seemed a bit simpler to me. Each app is in control of its own navigation history. You’ll have a back button present if you have views in your history. If you reach the bottom of stack, there is no back button. To leave the app, press the home button.
For whether or not I would switch back to Android: it would really be a matter of Apple dropping the ball on what they have going. In my tastes and in my usage, my allegiance is Apple’s to lose. I’m a bit concerned about the quality of the operating system after some of the huge strides Apple has made in the past two versions of iOS, but, overall, it’s been reliable for me.
[1]: A memory leak is when an allocated object can not be deallocated until the process that owns the object is terminated or the system is restarted (depending on what owns the said object).
[2]: I just want a reasonably sized device and even the 4.7" iPhone 6 feels too large for me.