Android vs Windows Phone from a Developer Perspective
First of all I
must say both of them have really good innovations. Android
for benefiting millions of people by giving at least a phone that could
run a smart stopwatch app and call that device a smartphone and Windows
Phone for providing something people can use easily and get to know
quickly. What makes me surprise most is Windows Phone being able to
facilitate a better user experience with a dual core processor which
Android does with a quad core processor. The time I am writing this
post, Windows Phone is no where with the number of devices when compare
with Android and my ex-favorite iOS.
Start making
notes about the developer perspective, Windows Phone is way far better
than Android and you will realize why eventually.
- Store Submission and Certification
You need to
have 25 USD to create a Google Play account and 49 USD for a Windows
Phone developer account. The cost is much in Windows Phone but the store
team make sure your app is safe for the end user to be used where as
Google Play is filled with apps that have malware due to lack of proper
certification process.
For Google Play
it takes only 4-5 hours but Windows Phone take more than double time at
the best case and can be gone up to 5 days even. This is because they
test the app on minimum of 5 devices under different themes and
conditions to ensure the user is served with a better user experience.
- Integrated Development Environment
There are many
IDEs could be used for Android development as Eclipse being the most
used. But the developer experience is horrible compared to the Visual
Studio. of course Android has many plugins to install and make things
easier but with Visual Studio all can be done without external plugins.
Even if you need, they are just a couple of clicks away.
Visual studio
has in built debugging facilities as well as watch windows where you can
test the app by even going through the variable levels.
- Emulator
You can cook
your dinner while keep loading the Android emulator as it is very slower
where as Windows Phone emulator is much smoother since it runs on
Hyper-V. Yes there are some certain requirements you need to run a
Windows Phone emulator but a person who can spend 49$ to buy a developer
account will definitely have a better laptop or a PC.
Another
good experience with the Windows Phone emulator is the availability to
check on location based apps and smooth experience on the testings for
accelerations.
- Designing
A smiling face
for an Android UI designer is very rare sight in the early days of his/
her carrier as even drag and drop options are not much supported well.
Eventually with the experience they will be able to start designing well
when they get to know that xml syntax well. Another painful thing is
the need to design in to many screen resolutions in some situations.
Right now
Windows Phone supports only 3 resolutions and the difference is
marginal. Therefore one resolution could be used to benefit others as
well. Also Microsoft has a really cool tool which makes even animations a
matter of 3-4 clicks work. It is expression Blend. Not only the drag
and drops, making gradients, testing in different color themes as well
as testing with custom themes is also simplified with this supper
awesome tool.
- Revenue
Here the
win definitely goes for Android since the number of devices that runs
Android is very much. But your app need to be smarter to beat all other
apps and make your one the choice.
- Learning Effort
If you are a
.NET developer, learning Windows Phone development is just a couple of
days work where as for Android you need to spend more time.
So I think I have made the right choice by being a Windows Phone developer. What do you say?
No comments:
Post a Comment