Which Platform You Should Target For Your First App: Android or iPhone?

by Pratik Kanada CEO & Founder

Android or iPhone?

In today’s world people use a variety of devices and these devices have their own fundamentals to develop apps for their platforms. These days you often find apps for both android and iPhone platform and this might lead to confusion as to which platform should be used to build your first app. We have some tips to help you out in choosing the perfect platform for your first app.

Revenue Generation:
Certain statistics like here shows that iOS App Store has generated six times the total revenues of the Android Market. iPhone app sales earned four times the profits of the Android Market, while iPad app sales made twice as much money as Android Market app sales. iPhone app sales earned four times the profits of the Android Market, while iPad app sales made twice as much money as Android Market app sales.

The free apps have become a dominant business strategy for app developers on both major platforms. In this monetization approach, the developers build revenue through in-app purchases of the free apps. About 50 percent of the top 200 grossing iOS apps are now free apps and around 65 percent in case of Android.

Number of Downloads and activations:

The iOS App Store observed more than 18 billion app downloads, while Android recently crossed the 10 billion downloads mark. The number of Android activations is now up to 700,000 devices per day.

Distimo’s vice-president and co-founder Remco van den Elzen says: “Google has been less successful in getting users to pay for apps because Google Checkout is considered to be more cumbersome than iTunes. More importantly, however, Apple has always been very successful in getting everyone to enter their credit card details when activating their devices. This has benefited Apple significantly, as the threshold for purchasing the first application is lower.”

Some statistics show that app generates more revenue in iPhone compared to Android and that is probably the reason why apps come up on iPhone first and then on Android – find out here. The number of users purchasing apps from iPhone is more than that of Android.

App Testing:

Android has good testing environment for its developers. All the testing tools available are neatly indexed and the IDE offers a good model of the source code. This lets developers test their app thoroughly and debug wherever required, before posting it to the Android Market. Moreover Android has wide range of devices so you need to test in number of devices each with different screen size and different processors.

Apple does not have a good debugging solution compared to Android for testing your apps. But on the other hand you do not need to test on a number of devices in case of iphone. This brings confidence in developer once the testing is carried out.

Approval of your app and Payment:

The Android Market has no strict guidelines to develop app. This makes it very convenient for the Android app developer. Android developers need to pay a one-time registration fee of $25 and can earn 70% of revenue of the sales of their app in the Android Market. They can also feature the same app in other app marketplaces too.

On the other hand, the Apple App Store takes 3-4 weeks for app approval. There are some guidelines which developer needs to follow while building app otherwise the app may get rejected.iOS developers can earn 70% of the revenue generated from the sales of their app in the Apple App Store and they have to pay an annual fee of $99 to gain access to the iPhone SDK.

App Piracy:

In case of android, you can get most of the paid apps for free by just carrying out a simple web search and download the application and install. This might potentially reduce the app selling compared to apps that are sold in iPhone.

In iPhone, you need to jailbreak the device and then you can install 3rd party apps. But majority of the iPhone users does not recommend to jailbreak for a number of good reasons such as security and maintainability of the device.

TAE Thought:

With the points discussed above, TAE recommends to begin with iPhone as it provides good revenue, number of downloads and negligible piracy. Development costs of Android apps are 20% higher compared with iOS apps due to Android fragmentation. At some point apps can be later built on Android too with a good revenue strategy.

Source from The App Entrepreneur