"Downloading the Android SDK" is actually a dozen
     steps of installs, updates, add-ons, setting up 
     emulator devices and so on.

That's not true. The first time I did it, it took me something like 10 minutes. I must say that I was already familiar enough with Eclipse to install the plugin without much struggling (though it can't get any easier, unless it came built-in). Beginners should also try out IntelliJ IDEA which comes with Android integration built-in.

     The Apple dance takes a couple minutes to 
     do and costs $99/year.

That's also not true. It took me somewhere between 2 and 3 hours. And you don't have to pay $99 for getting the Hello World on your phone, but you do have to fuck around with certificates for signing the binary and you also have to read a lot of documentation.

The certificates cost $99/year. You can't put hello world on your iPhone without those.

You are right that joining Eclipse and the Android SDK is not as seamless as it should be. Technically you don't need Eclipse and the SDK can create Hello World for you in addition to building and deploying it. (Another minor difference I noticed between Android and Xcode/iOS is that a auto-created Android project printed "hello project" on the screen while the iOS one was blank.)

These are the Android SDK instructions, and each step can point to multiple others: http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html

As for the Apple dance, can you point me to the URL or actual documentation I can follow to get all the certificates, admin and whatever else it wants? All I can find is doc saying I need to do it, but nothing saying how to do it!

There is a "iOS Provisioning Portal" and the "Development Provisioning Assistant", a 4-step wizard that guides you through creating the necessary profiles, but they are behind a login. There's a few SSs over at PhoneGap docs: http://www.adobe.com/fr/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/phonegap...

I cannot find any way of doing this other than handing over $99 to Apple. See for example this page https://developer.apple.com/programs/start/ios/

The provisioning portal is supposedly at http://developer.apple.com/ios/manage/overview/index.action but it won't let you in until you hand over money for annual membership.

That's correct.

Ahem, if you are registering from something like India. You will have to fax some documents to them for review. There is no option to even pay online. In fact, this song and dance is so time consuming that, I haven't bothered to register an account myself.

I'm from Brazil. Just fill the form and use any free fax web service. Your CC will be billed on approval.

I have no idea whether you are talking about Apple or Google.

It was for Apple obviously. Only apple can require you to pay $99 and fax them your proof of identity just for running a app on your own device (actually, I no longer remember which document they asked, but I remember I didn't had time or motivation to scan and fax those documents).

There are not documents to scan, there's a form that you have to download and put your credit card info on and fax it.

Still pretty lame to still be faxing payment info in 2012.

> The Apple dance takes a couple minutes to do

You either got lucky or did the Apple dance a lot more recently than some of us. When I did the Apple dance, I had to wait more than a month before my application to be a developer was "approved", then it took weeks to figure out how to get the certificate stuff working. Even after I got it working it was fragile - my ability to put an app on the phone was never something I could expect would just work - it would spontaneously break with a cryptic error for no apparent reason.

If you are using the simulator, you also need to setup that separately in a complicated process, and then it runs damn slow. YOu need to match versions as well. I had an old eclipse, and there was no warning, but I could not get the newer android sdks.

Apple have it right once you have installed xcode. And if you only want to run in the simulator, you do not need to worry about certs.

They both could improve, but are also light years ahead of BB.

"Downloading the Android SDK" is actually not a dozen steps of installs and updates.

It involves downloading one archive, unpacking it, running the SDK manager, checking checkboxes for target platforms you want to develop for and waiting for a couple of minutes, until it downloads. You can also set-up emulator devices for the different platforms.

That's quite a short of complications you speak of.

Yeah, it was significantly more difficult to set up an Android dev environment than it was to get Xcode working. Not to mention, the Android SDK is actually a ton of different SDKs for every possible version of the OS, with a bunch of device-specific SDKs on top of those.

Don't even get me started on emulators. AVD Manager is a joke.