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

Android or iPhone for First Mobile App?

In today’s world, people use a variety of devices and these devices have their fundamentals to develop apps for their platforms. These days you often find apps for both android and iPhone platforms 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 show 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.

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 the case of Android.

The 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.

Which Platform For Your First App

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 on iPhone compared to Android, which is probably why apps come up on iPhone first and then on Android – find out here. The number of users purchasing apps on iPhone is more than that of Android.

App Testing:

Android has a 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 a wide range of devices so you need to test a number of devices each with different screen sizes 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 the case of the iPhone. This brings confidence to the developer once the testing is carried out.

Approval of your app and Payment:

The Android Market has no strict guidelines for developing apps. This makes it very convenient for the Android developer. They need to pay a one-time registration fee of $25 and can earn 70% of the revenue from 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 that developer needs to follow while building an 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 the case of android, you can get most of the paid apps for free by just carrying out a simple web search and downloading the application, and install. This might potentially reduce the app selling compared to apps that are sold on iPhone.

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

TAE Thought:

With the points discussed above, TAE recommends beginning with iPhone as it provides good revenue, number of downloads, and negligible piracy. The development cost of Android apps is 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.