Android vs. iPhone: How Google is winning hearts of developers

Re:Android vs. iPhone: How Google is winning hearts of devel... by ryanjmo on Friday June 25, 2010 @07:54PM (#1462643)

So one problem I have with developing for the Android platform, is that I don't know how to go about it and I don't understand the different Android versions and which phones have which version of the OS and how many people have each version.

Starting development for the iPhone was really simple, I went to one place on Apples site, downloaded xcode and started building.

While I don't think it will have hard to figure out all the answers to my questions once I get started, there are a lot of unknowns for me in terms of the Android platform. My main point is this, it is much more clear how to get started building for the iPhone, which I think gives Apple a large advantage.

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Re:Android vs. iPhone: How Google is winning hearts of devel... by ww520 on Saturday June 26, 2010 @12:32AM (#1463110)

For me, I just develop for the lowest common version, 1.5. Don't need the latest feature in my app. The important thing is to figure out what's interesting and useful for the end user, not the latest and greatest OS feature.

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Re:Android vs. iPhone: How Google is winning hearts of devel... by ryanjmo on Saturday June 26, 2010 @07:53AM (#1463546)

Cool everyone, thanks for the info. This makes sense that the software would be forward compatible (I guess I should have assumed this, but I didn't even know this was the case).

The only significant thing that we need are push notifications; in which version did push notifications start, did Google change how they were done?

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Re:Android vs. iPhone: How Google is winning hearts of devel... by portlandFan12 on Friday June 25, 2010 @09:22PM (#1462790)

http://developer.android.com/index.html should get you started. It even has a link to "Target Devices" that shows you what percentage of active devices run each version of the Android OS.

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Re:Android vs. iPhone: How Google is winning hearts of devel... by biafra on Saturday June 26, 2010 @03:08AM (#1463294)

Maybe this site helps with the fragmentation issues:

http://androidfragmentation.com/

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