In this article, I discuss two main reasons why I prefer Android development over iOS.
Becoming an expert in Android requires less time.
Android apps are typically written in Java, which is the most popular programming language
and it has been around for quite a while.
This means there is a lot of Android learning material out there to help you to quickly become highly proficient
in the language.
Swift is a very new programming language used to develop iOS apps. Because it is new, there aren’t as many resources to help you like there are with Java. The iOS learning material I have used was at times quite hard to follow because of the changing syntax between different Swift versions. Objective C can also be used to write iOS apps. I have very little experience with Objective C but according to some, it should have died out a long time ago.
Android’s tools are better.
Android Studio is the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used to develop Android apps and is a pleasure to use
(auto format, auto complete, detecting compile errors and refactoring existing code are all possible
with Android Studio). xCode is the IDE used to develop iOS apps and it is not so amazing.
It is quite buggy – sometimes it would crash for no reason and I found it quite unintuitive (especially the storyboard).
I decided Android was a better choice because one can quickly become an expert in Java and it has a superior IDE. This allows me to have more fun building apps that are of higher quality. A clear win for me.
