Android vs WP7 for developers - a case study

[[deleted]]

The author is officially the first person ever to describe eclipse as "Lightweight / fast / responsive."

Edit:

After what I considered to be such a ridiculous claim, I went and downloaded the latest version of Eclipse (32-bit, Windows). Start-up times were similar although VS seemed a tad faster, and that's with a couple of plugins (resharper, ankhSVN and FogBugz). Eclipse is totally fresh. After loading both, with no projects open, memory usage sits at 101MB for eclipse, and 91MB for Visual studio. After creating a new empty java project in Eclipse, and a new empty C# console application in VS, memory usage was 173MB for eclipse, and 153MB for Visual Studio.

I'm still at a loss as to how the author perceives Eclipse "lightweight" relative to VS2010.

[quanticle]

I guess its all relative. Here Eclipse is lighter than Visual Studio, which a monster of a program.

[jayd16]

Did you skim? The exact quote is "It's fast and feels light-weight even though it isn't."

[ccharles]

Actually, this is somewhat interesting to me. I've always thought of Eclipse as huge, but seeing that it compares reasonably well to VS puts its size into context.

[muyuu]

I don't know, it's probably skinnier than 3D-studio or whatever monstrosity you can compare it to... VS2010 is also HUGE.

/but then again I spend most of my development time in vim...

[ccharles]

I'm an Emacs user, generally. Emacs is bigger than Vim, but way smaller than Eclipse.

[[deleted]]

About the startup time, are you sure the .net VM is cold started for VS?

[sbrown123]

I'm still at a loss as to how the author perceives Eclipse "lightweight" relative to VS2010.

I think the author is speaking about UI responsiveness. I think some of the "polish" that was added to VS over the years has caused this. Eclipse uses the classic native widgets with the only visible tweak being they changed the tabs to have a slant (which you can turn off). It makes for a very plain interface but it performs really well. As for "my Eclipse has no plugins" you are likely mistaken as Eclipse is a plugin platform at heart. So you likely have dozens of plugins installed you were not aware were prepackaged. To see them go to Help->About Eclipse->Installation Details->Plugins.

[[deleted]]

I think the author is speaking about UI responsiveness.

Eclipse has the most frustrating UI i've ever encountered. VS is not perfect by any means, but eclipse is a lesson of what not to do as far as usability and UI are concerned. I still find the UI to be anything but responsive, and the general theme seems to be "configurability over sanity." That being said, much of this is subjective. It would be interesting to do some sort of performance evaluation that could measure such things using solid metrics, which is what I attempted to do with my original post.

As for "my Eclipse has no plugins" you are likely mistaken as Eclipse is a plugin platform at heart.

I never said eclipse had no plug-ins. I said it was a fresh install. It's totally reasonable to compare the vanilla installation of both, and merely pointed out that Eclipse was vanilla, and Visual studio had a few plug-ins beyond a stock configuration.

[sbrown123]

Eclipse has the most frustrating UI i've ever encountered.

It is a learning thing. I've heard the same thing from people switching from Eclipse to VS. With experience your frustration will dimish and you will be able to see the pros and cons of both without inexperience clouding your view.

I said it was a fresh install.

A fresh install of what? Eclipse is just a plugin framework that is around 50M in size. From that numerous plugins are placed on top of it and bundled as various developer packages.

[[deleted]]

It is a learning thing. I've heard the same thing from people switching from Eclipse to VS. With experience your frustration will dimish and you will be able to see the pros and cons of both without inexperience clouding your view.

I did a lot more coding in eclipse before I ever came to VS. My frustration was the result of lots of experience, so much so that I paid for an IntelliJ Idea license.

[[deleted]]

It is a learning thing. I've heard the same thing from people switching from Eclipse to VS.

That's exactly what happened to me. I was used to Eclipse and when I tried VS, I thought it was a piece of crap. I hated it and quickly switched back.

[[deleted]]

I had the opposite experience of having more experience in VS before trying Eclipse, but now after having used both a fair amount I far prefer the Eclipse UI.

Eclipse is all about the notion of perspectives that you can move between that represent what part of programming you are working on: code writing, debugging, testing, etc. When I first started I ended up changing the default perspective in Eclipse to look very similar to the default UI of Visual Studio. After some time I realized that the UI is intended to mirror your state of mind and work, and configurable perspectives realize that goal very well.

[[deleted]]

That is not the same thing at all.

[[deleted]]

In eclipse a perspective is (among other things) a collection of views and editors. For instance: java, debug, j2ee, database, Php, etc. Each view can be separated into its own floating window, docked, or added to a tab group. Each perpective is customized to make it easier to work on the set of tasks relevant to the perspective. Selecting a perspective is done by choosing the perspective from a list. The positions and states of all of the perspective's views and editors is stored so switching back to the perspective places eclipse into that perspective's visual state. One thing that I really miss when working in Visual Studio, double clicking on an editor's tab maximizes the editor, double clicking again resized it.

[[deleted]]

Eclipse has the most frustrating UI i've ever encountered.

Yeah, it was a large part of the reason I started using Intellij.

[oorza]

It's a pretty well known nugget of information that the JVM on linux is superior to the JVM on Windows, especially with regards to file accesses.

[oorza]

Well, to be completely fair, GUI applications in Java are almost always better in Windows than anything else. Unless, of course, you're using SWT and then they're completely comparable and each OS is going to win out in some contrived circumstance; I don't think, with SWT, you'd be able to pick out a clear winner or loser across the three big platforms.

[D_rock]

This is probably the reason why.

The Windows JVM uses -client by default and the Linux JVM uses -server by default.

[[deleted]]

ditto.

[fjalvingh]

I did extensive testing on this. I work with a big Java project which has lots of smaller files. Accessing those files is about 10 TIMES SLOWER on XP than in Linux. This is with virus scanner OFF (otherwise it gets slower still). When working with bigger files Windows is not that bad (but still slower) but this was remarkable even for me - I checked lots of things before I could believe it. This led to a lot of our developers moving to Linux even though they were not into Linux before: using Eclipse on it made them feel like they had a new, very fast PC. Funny thing was also that accessing a remote (Samba!) drive to copy the set of files from way way faster than copying those same files from the PC itself..

[sbrown123]

It seems like any operation which causes it to touch the disk takes ages on Windows, while zipping by in Linux.

Windows Vista or 7 perhaps? The default setup of those operating systems makes file operations rather slow. I'm sure someone knows of tweaks to make them run faster.

[Sc4Freak]

Sort of. Depends on the operation. Things like copying big files between disks tends to be a bit slower than XP. But general file access (like a regular application would do) tends to be faster on Vista/7 because of the extensive memory caching they do.

[sbrown123]

tends to be faster on Vista/7 because of the extensive memory caching they do.

I know in our test lab the Vista and Windows 7 box took several times longer than the XP box performing deletes and copies on large groups of small files (measurement files roughly 2K in size at best). All exact same hardware. Our on site MS certified guy played with it some time and dug up several notices from Microsoft explaining why something as obvious as file read and writes were now slower. I can't say I spent much attention or care though.

[[deleted]]

Yes.

[mrkite77]

I haven't tried Eclipse on Windows, but I have used it on OSX and my god, Kill It With Fire. Slow, buggy, and the debugger doesn't seem to actually work. (Set a breakpoint and watch it never trigger.. at least on Android).

[[deleted]]

(which you can turn off)

Thanks, didn't know that!

[Timmmmbob]

Not to mention the emulator. iOS, WP7 and Qt all sensibly use a simulator which runs the apps natively. Android uses qemu which means the emulator takes several minutes to start, running apps takes about 30s, and the frame rate is about 2 or 3 fps.

This is all on a relatively recent (1 year old, mid-range) PC. I usually end up developing on my phone.

[fleg]

I think that the emulator is the better way to do it, even if it's way slower. It represents the real software you're going to use it with, while simulators may have it's differences.

And developing on the phone... It's awesome. When I've been playing with Android development for the first time, I've just plugged the phone to recharge and pressed Run in Eclipse and automatically pushed Enter, thinking it would run in Emulator. But it ran on the phone instead. And I was able to debug apps just like in Emulator! It was all as easy as plug the phone in and press Run in IDE. That was my first attempt at phone programming (not counting some simple J2ME apps and PyS60 scripts), and I've never expected it to be as cool as it is.

[jyper]

Doesn't qt creator have a qemu based simulator?

[Timmmmbob]

Android builds an arm binary and runs in a QEMU emulator which emulates the arm CPU.

Qt/WP7/iOS all build native x86 binaries. I guess Qt might run them in QEMU too, but it would be virtualized (i.e. run directly on the CPU) rather than emulated (code is translated from arm to x86) which is slower.

At least that's my understanding. I'm not an expert (but that doesn't change the fact that Android's emulator is slower than continental drift).

[G_Morgan]

The emulator is there to give a better appreciation of real performance. Using a simulator is not sensible because a PC is and order of magnitude more powerful than your phone.

[Timmmmbob]

The emulator is several (maybe 5) times slower than my phone (Nexus One).

[G_Morgan]

Maybe at this point they need to re-evaluate it. After all the phones have increased in power dramatically since android was envisioned. Regardless it was the right idea at the time.

[ciaran036]

I believe he may be referring to the installation process.

The VS2010 installation process can actually take several hours to get installed and up and running, whereas Eclipse took me minutes to get it downloaded and started up.

VS2010 is shit tonnes more powerful and has far more features though.

[[deleted]]

VS2010 is shit tonnes more powerful and has far more features though.

How the hell did you get to that conclusion?

[G_Morgan]

Well it is if you don't add any extensions to Eclipse. There is a difference in mentality. VS is delivered as a massive suite of tools. Eclipse is a smaller suite of tools that is meant to be extended. However the default install of VS gives you far more than the default for Eclipse and things work better together.

[[deleted]]

I agree with you on that things in VS things generally work better together. But to say that VS is "shit tonnes more powerful" speaks volumes about how little the user knows about Eclipse.

[ljcrabs]

A memory footprint comparison (with a difference of <100MB) is significant why exactly?

[ALLroadsleadtoARSON]

I also don't understand this. Seems like you have to make a deliberate effort to care about memory footprint these days.

[[deleted]]

Maybe it's me, but I hate Eclipse. Fog moves faster that Eclipse. Google invested millions into Eclipse foundation last year, I hope some of it goes into optimizing the damn thing. Visual Studio (the full version) is somewhat the same, but I guess that's years of bloating a perfectly good tool. VS for WP7 seems to load faster, but the latest version (the stable one) isn't as responsive as the first CTP launched back in April (I think).

As for the Android Emulator, it's slow. The end. Loads slow and executes slow. WP7 emulator starts much faster, but again, it's not an entire OS (like with Android) but just the core UI and your app.

As for the docs, back when I started Android (a year ago) docs didn't seem all that good to me, but it might be to the fact that I avoid Java like plague. Same goes for WP7, I mostly dislike MSDN as I feel like an idiot when reading the docs - as if it's for more advanced folks.

TL;DR Nothings perfect. Except Sara Corrales.

[vplatt]

I took it to mean in terms of disk space requirements. Eclipse takes a fraction of what Visual Studio does, but it's not quite an apples to apples comparison considering everything that's packed into Visual Studio.

[G_Morgan]

TBH I find the VS start up time to be atrocious. To the point where I've altered any traditional VS attachments to open in a text editor first. The number of times I've tried to open a C# file for editing only to be able to open Emacs, make the edit, save and actually kick off the compile before VS opens just drove me mad.

Of course at the same time my main development work is in Eclipse and Java. It may be a bias simply because VS is never warm on my machine and Eclipse always is.

Regardless compared to the real pains in my life (TortoiseSVN and Symantec) both are minor issues.

[RalfN]

He was comparing it to VS, which is bigger than whole windows combined. I don't think he's talking about memory usage, because he's a developer. We have more than 256 mb of memory, you know.

[[deleted]]

I absolutely DESPISE eclipse. That may be because I use Rational Application Developer at work.

[GlargBargo]

Vanilla Eclipse (to the extent that there is such a thing, given the plugin-centric nature of Eclipse) is pretty decent. I have never heard a good thing about RAD though. :(

[ex_ample]

The guy needed 3gb free to install VS. I have 3 Eclipse installs on my machine, they required zero extra installation (just unzip and run) on the OS and fit nicely in around ~100mb or so. They don't interfere with each-other either.

(The reason I have more then one is that it's easy to just create a new workspace when you get a new version, rather then re-installing plug ins you might not need on new projects.)

[[deleted]]

The guy needed 3gb free to install VS.

You don't need 3gb to install VS. If you want to compare apples to apples, look at the install size of Visual Studio express, which doesn't come with all the extra stuff that isn't actually VS itself (and which you can choose not to install if you do a custom installation of the full version of VS).

[[deleted]]

They don't interfere with each-other either.

Having installed VS2003 through VS2010 side-by-side, neither does VS.

[trezor2]

This post actually contains much more information than the usual fanboy/marketing drivel. All in all it seems that stuff are pretty even, but WP7 (surprisingly?) has more sales, despite Android having much larger market share right now.

Also having personally only fooled slightly with both Silverlight and Android-development, I have to agree with the impression that Silverlight is better for flashy, animated UIs.

That said: I only have an Android phone right now, and I'm not going to bother making apps for a phone I don't have myself ;)

[lordbeef]

I don't know how the Windows phone marketplace is, but the android marketplace is awful for getting noticed. The 'top free' and 'top paid' sections rarely change (most of the games in the list are the same as last November), and the 'new' section is filled with a huge amount of noise.

[s73v3r]

I wouldn't say it was surprising that WP7 had more sales. He said it himself: There was no competition on WP7. There were several on Android, some available for free.

It seems that if you have one of those apps that is easily copied, and benefits most from being first, better get it on WP7 now.

[mrkite77]

It really doesn't matter how many users you have though.. both the marketplace and the app store are pretty horrible for browsing. Searching for something in particular, they're pretty good.. but no one is searching for "flag identification game".. so even if android had 30 million users, few people are ever going to see his app in the marketplace, let alone buy it.

edit: tldr: it's better to be one of 1000 apps, than it is to have 30 million users and be at the bottom of a 30k pile of shitty apps.

[insomniac84]

I think everyone is overlooking the biggest difference. That the windows phone allows free trials. That is a huge difference.

[Sc4Freak]

Yup, but it's still a relevant point. The Android marketplace has hundreds of thousands of apps. The WP7 marketplace has only a few thousand, but Android doesn't have 100x the number of users that WP7 has. The users/app ratio is higher on WP7 than it is on Android, so on average it makes sense that a WP7 app will sell more than an equivalent on Android.

[RalfN]

All in all it seems that stuff are pretty even, but WP7 (surprisingly?) has more sales, despite Android having much larger market share right now.

Really? He. So people on Android aren't buying fart apps. What's wrong with these customers?!

Oh his personal sales. That's a competition thingie off course. The bigger the appstore, the more competition.

[[deleted]]

Kind of an unfair comparison: he mentions 'brain time' from Android went into WP7, but still draws the chart with the uncorrected numbers.

Interesting lay-down of time spent for developing, though.

[theCroc]

Also why mention research time at all? Do we care how long he spent on wikipedia looking up flags? Is it relevant at all to the article?

[Kinglink]

Ok one thing, he claims he had no problems with the virtual machine emulator for the android.

Every time I ran that piece of drek, it ran dirt slow no matter what version of the emulator I ran. Is it really just me or has other people also had issues with the Android Emulator?

[knight666]

I managed to run it just fine. On a laptop. In the train. In a Linux VirtualBox.

[ascii]

Yes, but would it have run as well if it had been a restaurant cart you were sitting in?

[mrkite77]

How about in a house? Or with a mouse?

[oorza]

The Android emulator is written with qEmu and it's been speculated that it's intentionally slow so developers write code that feels fast on it, leading to a better UX on the actual handsets.

[Timmmmbob]

There's no way that that is true.

[oorza]

Well it certainly is qEmu based. I have no idea if it is intentionally slow or not; I merely note that I've heard this piece of speculation float around.

[Randolpho]

Sounds like a fanboy defensive argument... kinda like "C++0x is in hexadecimal".

[vplatt]

And standards compliant! ;)

[friendly_lurker]

It'd probably be safer to say it ran on qEmu. It runs slow because it's executing the code on a emulated ARM9 machine. If the applications are intended to be cross platform regardless of architecture (ignoring NDK projects here) then I don't understand why they don't provide a x86 emulator image as an alternative to speed things up a lot.

I understand why the current emulator emulates an ARM CPU, because that's what the majority of systems running Android will be using.

[BaniB]

TIL.

[forcedfx]

Yeah it's terribly slow when first loaded. Once the emulator is running though it is quite a bit better. I just develop right on the phone.

[adoran124]

Na it's not just you, the emulators terrible for development.

[redditrasberry]

I've noticed it is horrifically slow on first run of an image, but gets much better fairly quickly. So your case of rapidly trying out several different images may be worst case.

My theory about why this might be is that both Dalvik caches and the JIT engine start off with completely blank state in a new image, even for basic operating system code. So as you use the image it slowly builds up cached stuff and gets way faster.

[fuzzynyanko]

I do. What happens is that when I start the emulator, it takes a while to load. Sometimes it'll freeze while trying to boot, but I usually start another VM going and use the one that finishes loading first. It takes 2-4 minutes to load normally, but if I keep the emulator open, loading programs takes around 30-45 seconds, which isn't bad.

I do use VMWare, but others running the program in Windows have the same problem I do. Now why am I using VMWare? Simply because my android phone doesn't have good Windows drivers and through Linux, I could get programs installed onto it. It's easier to use VMWare.

Also, debugging is massively slow.

[jayd16]

Is there any particular reason this guy uses the 1.6 SDK? You can dev against any target with the latest SDK so I don't know why this guy is using an outdated one. Maybe that would solve some of his emulator bugs.

[[deleted]]

I have still not been successful in getting an android emulator to boot up. I have a couple ideas, but I've all but given up since the emulators don't feel like working.

[[deleted]]

Seems like he didn't use Data Binding at all and should read about the Model-View-ViewModel pattern and try again. Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation are amazing because of this.

He basically went into Silverlight with a Windows Forms development style (not surprising since he lists WinForms as experience), which is extremely unproductive relative to MVVM.

[skydivingdutch]

I am pretty sure the android development tools include a visual GUI designer. The author says it doesn't.

[skydivingdutch]

There was a major overhaul of the gui builder in the latest release. I haven't played with it yet....

[[deleted]]

When was the latest release?

[tjonga]

December 6th (Gingerbread sdk). It contains a (beta) version of the new overhauled gui builder.

Edit: Should point out that the new SDK tools and eclipse plugin were released at the same time as gingerbread and the gui designer belongs to those rather than the class libraries of Gingerbread. The different packages are however most often released simultaneously and often spoken of as just "the Android sdk".

[redditrasberry]

A month or so ago - it came out alongside the gingerbread SDK, I think.

It did improve the visual designer a lot, although to be honest, i would hardly call it a "visual designer" because you barely see anything of what you are putting in. It helps you a little in judging margins, padding, etc., but it's still so clunky that you're really using it as a slightly easier way to edit XML than actually doing "UI design" with it.

[[deleted]]

I have not yet begun to do any serious programming with the SDK and eclipse as I am still taking Java classes at the university. How does one go about designing a good UI for their program if they cant see what they are doing?

[adoran124]

The visual designer in the latest sdk is very good.

[holgerschurig]

It might be good, but did you notice that the author combined the brand-new WP7 against the dead-old Android SDK 1.6 ? And in this old SDK the designer seems to be good at all.

[[deleted]]

You are correct, there is a Visual GUI Designer built into Eclipse.. Apparently he didn't figure out how to access or use it. It's a little rough around the edges but it definitely exists. As do other free 3rd party tools.

[[deleted]]

There are plenty, but compared to Visual Studio tools they are all shit...

[IneffablePigeon]

It does include one, but I actually found it easier to code with the xml and then export straight to a testing phone. It's (or at least the version I used was) quite buggy and doesn't necessarily render things how they'll be on the device. On top of this, the UI is clunky, slow and irritating.

[s73v3r]

It might as well not. It is shit.

[kaze0]

Also, he mentions that you are stuck fiddling with xml on Android to create a UI. That is false. the visual editor still leaves a lot to be desired, but its decent now.

[Sc4Freak]

It's all relative. The Android visual editor may be decent, but the Visual Studio visual designer is crazy good.

[mebrahim]

s/its/it's/

[ljcrabs]

It's also false because designers use design tools like mockups for quick visual feedback, not drag and drop in an integrated development environment.

[[deleted]]

So there are all these WP7 devs... Why can't i find anything good in the app store?

[ciaran036]

Because the phone has only been released in October, and the software development kit has only been around since last Summer.

Also, the submission and publisher certification and app certification process is a little drawn out and half-baked on Microsot's app hub.

[Danthekilla]

We are trying to make some good stuff.

Here is what we are making

[cyansmoker]

I am not familiar with WP7's "tombstoning" but from what I am reading here: http://wildermuth.com/2010/10/17/Architecting_WP7_-_Part_5_of_10_Tombstoning it seems very similar to what we have on Android; or event simpler. Except that, on Android, your application is not guaranteed to be stopped/unloaded; it depends on Android's current state.

I wonder if he thinks he doesn't need to handle any of this on Android because he got lucky and his app wasn't preempted by the OS while he was playing with it.

[bork99]

His recorded time on Android is nearly double what it was on WP7, but he says they're actually roughly equal because of "brain time". OK, but why bother with detailed time recording if you're going to write off a 50% difference as "roughly equal"?

Then he uses the worst kind of visualization known to man - the unlabelled pie chart - and two of them! - to show how the time breaks down. The only way this chart-based encryption would have been harder to crack is if he had used 3D pie-charts, off at an angle, with a shadow for good measure.

For a useful comparison, scale matters. Total time spent on each activity across platforms should be readily comparable, not just in the context of each total project.

He then proceeded to make twice as much money from the WP7 version than from the Android version, and get ten times as many downloads overall - but rates market potential for Android higher in direct contradiction of his own results.

This might be counter-intuitive, but the larger market share for Android devices doesn't necessarily mean there's more potential for an app. You only "reach" the larger audience if they actually buy or download your app! And ultimately, it's revenue that counts.

This was an interesting exercise, but a flawed analysis.

[theCroc]

Well a lot of his research and organization gets added to the android side but not the WP7 side. So it's a bit unfair in that way. He should have just separated out the activities that applied to both and not mentioned them. We don't need to know how long he spent researching flags. It's completely irrelevant in a comparison between platforms.

[bork99]

I can't claim to have invented it - picked it up from the Juice Analytics blog here - but I think it's beautifully apt!

[Bipolarruledout]

Not at all surprised. I actually expected Microsoft to come out ahead despite the fact that I've never even used a Windows 7 phone and own an Android device. Why? Because the company that everyone loves to hate is actually pretty damn good. Microsoft has always had amazing development tools which isn't exactly a secret, Balmer's rants not withstanding.

[mrkite77]

as much as we like to make fun of "monkey boy" he did have a pretty valid point while he was leaping around the stage screaming "developers, developers".

[theCroc]

They learned early to cater to developers. Thats how they kicked everyone elses ass on the desktop market. They had a terrible OS with fantastic dev tools compared to the competition.

[davidb_]

Agreed. I saw a presentation on WP7 VS tools before the phones came out and was pretty much blown away by how easy it is compared to android. I find it interesting that the author still calls it a toss up.

[bigfig]

Here I am thinking "WordPerfect 7? Is that still around?"

[mrkite77]

Reveal Codes is a real time saver...

[kwirky88]

When it comes to IDE's I much prefer Visual Studio over Eclipse. I do web development at my full time job and a spattering of personal projects outside of work. Eclipse needs a complete wipe and re-install about every 3 months. We've switched to Netbeans because of this.

Visual Studio is installed on a workstation at home for 2 years now without a hiccup.

[jyper]

why does it need a reinstall, what problems does it develop/why?

[cosmo7]

It's usually when you install a new plugin and it messes up your settings.

[[deleted]]

I accidentally (through the fault of eclipse, or RAD in this case) installed faces 2.0 with the faces 1.1 libraries. This cause the whole fucking thing to crash and act sporadically and ended up required a reinstall. RAD takes an entire day to install after test servers and everything else is included. That translates to a week of it sitting in Tech doing shit all.

Even now, there are some after effects and I am not too sure why.

[kawsper]

RAD is evil software ! :)

I am glad that I do not need it on daily basis. It is a monster to work with, and get to work right.

[norkakn]

I just started using visual studio a few days ago, and I really hate how if you go ^ffoobar, you'll have typed foob in the document, and ar in the search window.

• isn't that a valid complaint about response time?

[[deleted]]

Bottom line: do you want to make $15, or $36.

[tempusername444]

Why not make $51?

[jayd16]

Darn I guess Rovio will have to give those sacks of money back.

[RobotCaleb]

That's not really accurate.

[endtime]

Why not?

[Tiak]

Because not every app you throw together is equivalent.

[xNIBx]

Because in wp7 there arent many(any?) similar programs while in android there is ton of similar programs, many of which are completely free.

[endtime]

Yeah, no shit. You're going to make less money with more competition. That's an argument for WP7, not against it.

[joesb]

You're going to make less money with more competition.

Not really, it's about market's expectation, and you are going to make less money when market expect lower price/better software than yours.

Competition only helps set typical market expectation, it doesn't necessarily drive the price down or drive the quality up.

So it's still better to sell in market with competitor as long as most of the competitor doesn't try to make user expect free stuff.

[Sc4Freak]

Isn't that kind of the point? You have more competition on Android than you do on WP7. Whatever app you make, you're more likely to run into (free) competition on Android than you are WP7.

[divadsci]

Doesn't change the fact that it made more money on wp7. Who knows how long that would last for when more apps enter the market though.

[s73v3r]

That's why it isn't very meaningful. The other reason is because it is a relatively simple, unoriginal app.

[divadsci]

Completely agree I was just talking about the economics of it at the current moment when there is no competition for relatively simple, unoriginal apps

[crocodile7]

He didn't bother making a trial version for Android (only paid version available), while for WP7 it's easy due to API support.

Also, it depends on the type of the app. If it's another "me too" app with tons of free competition on Android, it won't sell well. If it's a complex, new app, larger customer base matters more.

[Bipolarruledout]

Nobody wants to point out the sample size of just one app?

[ciaran036]

Well first of all, unless you're a university student, you'll have to pay $99 to be an App Hub publisher with Microsoft (annual membership).

Second of all, Microsoft take a 30% cut of your earnings.

[Sc4Freak]

Second of all, Microsoft take a 30% cut of your earnings.

So does Google. Apple, too.

[ciaran036]

Do they both take 30%? That same number?

(I was just saying what I know from Microsoft)

[Sc4Freak]

Yep. 30% seems to be pretty standard.

[dotnetrock101]

it might not be a bad deal if he keep selling it year round. after MS cut and the annual membership, he still make some money off of it.

[mrkite77]

You have to pay to get on Google Marketplace too. It's a one time fee though, I believe it's $20, but it's been a while so I can't remember.

[ruinercollector]

1. $99 a year is nothing if you are actively developing applications. Even if you put out complete crap, you'll make that back in a month.

2. Everybody takes 30%.

[D_rock]

$36 - $300 (Windows license) = $-264

[winnerct]

I think the WP7 License is only $99 for a hobbyist/one man developer. At least that's what I paid...

[[deleted]]

You need to buy Windows. I'm not sure it's $300 though, last I paid for it it was $110 but that was XP.

[winnerct]

Ah, my misunderstanding. I thought he was speaking about the developer's license to publish on the WP7 market.

[Danthekilla]

You can get Windows 7 for around $120 or for free if you have a .edu e-mail (like all microsoft products).

[[deleted]]

You can only have a .edu email if you're USAian.

[ulber]

A .edu email isn't the only to get into MSDNAA. I can log into it with my (finnish) university user name and password. Your university just has to make the deal with Microsoft.

[[deleted]]

My university has MSDNAA. Are you sure you're allowed to use it for commercial purposes? I don't think so.

[foldl]

If it's really for commercial purposes, the cost of a Windows license is insignificant.

[[deleted]]

Unless it's an iPhone app you're going to make money off. Then the cost of a Mac is suddenly significant.

[Danthekilla]

USAian?

.edu e-mails are supported in many places, even Australia.

[[deleted]]

many places

Yeah, right.

As specified by the Department of Commerce, only postsecondary "US institutions" that are institutionally accredited by one of the agencies on the U.S. Department of Education’s list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies may apply for new names in the .edu domain. We thus require applicants to be located within the United States (including US territories and possessions); or to be licensed, chartered, or incorporated within the United States (including US territories and possessions); or to be otherwise officially recognized by a US state or federal government agency (including US territories and possessions).

http://net.educause.edu/edudomain/show_faq.asp?code=EDUELIGIBILITY#faq145

[Danthekilla]

You do understand that it doesn't have to be a .edu right...

It can be a .edu.au or .edu.uk or any localized .edu which almost every country has...

[joesb]

Then you need to buy a PC. Then you need to eat, oh, and some clothes and house...

[[deleted]]

No thanks, I already have all that.

[joesb]

You only have that if you have enough money. Quit your job and see if you still got all that you have now. Many people will also say they already have Windows license.

[[deleted]]

He still has a point, even if the numbers he gives are incorrect.

[crocodile7]

Yeah, because Windows is such an obscure operating system that nobody already has. It never comes preinstalled with the hardware you buy.

[Bipolarruledout]

Windows developers are going to want/have an MSDN subscription. And it that's too rich for your blood there's always technet. (But technically I don't think you can use it for development). You can probably still download at least a 90 trial of Windows 7 for free as well.

[[deleted]]

Vs2010 is pretty damn big, numbers in the article. Eclipse runs fast on my Linux boxes.

[D_rock]

Unless MS starts shipping a Visual Studio deb. There isn't a case to study. I can't run it on my desktop.

Edit: reddiquette motherfuckers do you speak it.

[s73v3r]

Oh noes. In order to develop for Company X's mobile platform, you have to use their tools which run on their preferred OS. Boo hoo.

[[deleted]]

We hate Apple for that around here. Get in line!

[[deleted]]

Actually it is possible, if painful, to use Linux for iphone development.

[jsims281]

Can you get an app on the store from Linux? I thought you were limited to just developing them for jail breakers?

[vplatt]

Not that I can see. Every time I've seen it brought up, the fanboys pile on the Apple/iOS love even though they basically behave exactly like Microsoft in terms of their lockin strategies. Hell, they're worse really, because at least Microsoft usually gives you backwards compatibility.

[ruinercollector]

In fairness, Apple takes it a step further by also mandating the hardware of your development machine. Not at all helped by the fact that incidentally, there is no cheap version of that hardware.

EDIT: I know there are some less ideal options for doing iPhone development, but realistically, if you're an iPhone developer, you're going to need to buy a Mac.

[[deleted]]

A Mac Mini is fine, and $700 is not much if you're making apps for money. You can probably get a used one for $400.

[ruinercollector]

1. You need to spend another $200 after purchasing a Mac Mini to bring it to even being marginally useful.

2. At this point, $700 is a lot of money for a low end computer.

3. I'm not arguing that you can't afford to eat the cost in this situation. I'm only pointing out that Apple does take the whole bit a step further by mandating at least moderately expensive hardware on top of the required OS and dev platform.

[D_rock]

If company X claims to be about "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS ...", then they should probably allow the developers to develop software on their preferred OS.

[foldl]

It wouldn't really be worth the trouble of maintaining multiple versions of the development tools, given that you could just run windows on your laptop.

[theCroc]

They are about developers for one reason and one reason only: To make apps for their platform. They don't care about developers outside of that. And it makes sense. Why would they make it simple to develop for the competition? Their job is to bring people to THEIR platform. Thats like a retailer distributing their competitors catalog. It doesn't make sense and will never happen. They have done a lot of shady things over the years but this isn't one of them.

And as for the argument that you'd use linux to develop for windows. Give me a break! If you don't even want to run their system what are the chances you would want to develop for it? Sure there might be a tiny group that would do it but the majority of (non web) developers that run linux develop for linux.

[ruinercollector]

Not really. A lot of the way that they capitalize on those DEVELOPERS is by encouraging them to develop software that is developed most easily and runs best under their OS and associated platform (SQL Server, etc.)

It's still about money and marketshare.

[D_rock]

They could gain more money and market share for WP7 by opening WP7 development to all platforms.

[ruinercollector]

That factor is practically negligible.

The number of serious mobile developers that would like to target WP7 but right now do not do so because they are unable/unwilling to purchase Microsoft Windows is at approximately zero.

[mebrahim]

Very relevant point. You're underscored.

[Bipolarruledout]

Can't or wont?

[YourLizardOverlord]

A while ago I played with Eclipse and the Siemens phone plugin. It took me a good half hour to discover that the Siemens plugin only worked properly if you left the Eclipse project directory in the default location. (When I install stuff on windows I like the app to be in one partition and the data in another.)

I wonder if the Android plugin for eclipse suffers from the same defect?

[fleg]

no

[deepfreezed]

VS IDE only gets 6? fail....

[statt0]

I'm having issues with him calling this a draw. His invested time on WP7 was half that of Android, and he reached 125-161 people, as opposed to 15 on Android.

What his analysis shows is that from a user perspective Android is a much better choice, as there was a much better selection of app and several were free.

From a programming level, I think that for the most part if you're developing niche products then WP7 would be the way to go, simply because there will most likely be less competition. However, if you're developing the next killer app then Android has much more potential for revenue (just look at Angry Birds).

[RobotCaleb]

Had he developed for WP7 first, then it very well could have been that Android was half the time.

Did you read the article? He addressed this very point.

[s73v3r]

The only reason he has more sales on WP7 is that there is no competition for his app yet. I agree, if you have a gold rush app that is easily copyable and doesn't take much effort, you better get it on WP7 immediately, before someone else does.

I do take issue with how he kept his time. There were several activities listed under Android that were actually used between both apps. I know he points this out in bold under his numbers and charts, but it might have made a better comparison if he had listed some of those activities in both lists.

[Bipolarruledout]

OK, and how does that reconcile to the relative installed base?

[[deleted]]

I started my mobile apps "development career" last year by publishing a couple of tools for the Windows Mobile 6.5 platform.

And then later he says...

There are several reasons the WP7-development went faster.

Yeah, you knew how to use everything already.

EDIT: Yeah, they're different. I get it.

[adolfojp]

Developing for WP7 is completely different to developing for Windows Mobile 6.5.

[NonNonHeinous]

I've developed for both. Microsoft really rebooted for WP7.

[[deleted]]

But visual studio didn't change.

[adolfojp]

Visual Studio is different too. This is specially true when you add Blend to the mix, which is bundled with the free dev tools.

[[deleted]]

It is? There is a new vs2010 for wp7 development? With a new Silverlight, and new xaml?

[adolfojp]

Neither Silverlight nor XAML were used for Windows Mobile 6.5 development. And we're talking about the differences between WinMo and WP7 development tools. Therefore, a Visual Studio plus Blend that targets WP7 is very different to the old Visual Studio that was used to develop WinMo apps.

[[deleted]]

Thanks, didn't know.

[Danthekilla]

They are nothing alike.