Our COO and Managing Engineer, Andrew Garkavyi spoke at SF Mobile Entrepreneurs meetup. In his presentation Andrew shared his experience and underlined some differences in mobile app development for iOS and Android.

1. 10 Things to Consider when
Choosing a Mobile Platform
Andrew Garkavyi,
COO at Stanfy

2. How do I know?

3. • 20 people
• 6 years in mobile
• Custom mobile app design and dev
• Over 60 apps
• Specialized in iOS & Android
• Live & breathe Agile, Scrum, Lean and XP

4. 1. What happens on the market

5. Mobile devices market share
81%
13%
4% 2%
0%
Sales
Android
iOS
Win Phone
Black Berry
Others
60% of all Android devices are cheap devices (around 200USD)
IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, November 12, 2013

6. Revenue
http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-index-market-q3-2013/

7. 2. Amount of devices

8. Not too much to worry about

9. There are a lot of them

10. 3. Screens and resolutions

11. http://en.paperblog.com/users/smartadblog/

12. Frightening?

13. It is not that bad …
think about density groups

14. 4. Operating systems

15. iOS version distribution

16. Android OS versions
Each previous major version support would cost you at least +20% of time
(applicable to iOS too)

17. 5. Open vs Closed

18. I can do everything I want…
not really!

19. If there is something missing,
you do not need that at all

20. 6. UI, Style…

21. It should be different

22. 7. Phone to tablet

23. It may be relatively simple

24. Or more complex

25. 8. Publishing in the markets

26. from 1 week AppStore/Market
time
4 hours
time consuming Development build
distribution
simple
100 (unless
enterprise)
Limit of test users No
Hard unless enterprise
or 3rd party services
Ease of installation
of dev build
Easy (install apk)
HockeyApp, TestFlight

27. 9. Time to support all that

28. When you sum up all together
> 2%

29. 10. Development costs

30. How much is that to build
• Core functionality can be done for 40% of time,
features will eat the rest (animations, shadows…)
• Effort is approximately the same for iOS and
Android
• Do one after another instead of 2 at same time

31. Conclusions
• Sometimes it may be worth to start with
Android 
• In many cases iOS is still a platform of the
first choice to prove your concept
• It may take a lot time, so select wisely…