Behind Enemy Lines
So I attended an iPhone development presentation at DevJam the other night. The presentation was a nice mixture of the pros and cons of the development ecosystem and a hands on demonstration of building an application. This was followed up by a discussion answering questions from the audience. It was an interesting night on multiple levels and wasn't what i was planning on seeing.
If you want to build an app for the iPhone you must also pay an annual fee. I guess you can call that the Apple tax which will keep some hobbyist away. Add that to the fact you need to develop in Objective C and you might as well forget building an app as a side project unless you actually want to develop in C. C is a horrible language to work in and I'm not going back.
I originally though the presentation was going to be on the analysis of what apps are on the market and where to target mobile phones towards. I was still happy with the presentation because it gave me a better idea on how iPhone apps are developed.
I can see that the Android platform is a direct response to the problems in the iPhone development cycle. The biggest issue is the closed system that the iPhone runs within. Once you've developed an app it must be submitted and approved before you can publish the app into iTunes (Apple's app store). This means your app can be rejected for any possible reason and if that happens you just blew all that development time for nothing.
If you want to build an app for the iPhone you must also pay an annual fee. I guess you can call that the Apple tax which will keep some hobbyist away. Add that to the fact you need to develop in Objective C and you might as well forget building an app as a side project unless you actually want to develop in C. C is a horrible language to work in and I'm not going back.
What I did like about the presentation was the UI development tool Cocoa. That was very slick watching how easy it was to create a UI component and associate it to your view controller. The tools do look nice to use and I hope that someone decides to create something like that for Android. So far I'm not aware of any UI tools that work as nice as Cocoa for android.
I can see why people would want to build apps for the iPhone, there are tons of them out there. So many people have an iPod touch or iPhone that it makes sense to build an app and try to enter that market. I just feel it's unrealistic for a hobbyist to enter.
I happen to love developing in Java and I got a distinct feel that the majority of that audience did not. I guess I'm not totally shocked by that since there is a minor movement away from Java currently in some facets of the industry. I still think developing in C is disgusting with it's memory leaks and pointers and crap like that I don't want to worry about.
After the presentation I spoke with a few people milling around. It's clear there is a real misunderstanding of the Android platform and marketplace. It seems people don't realize there is a single marketplace for apps in Android. It is also clear people don't understand how apps can work on different devices. I'd love to see an Android presentation for that group. Maybe I'd present but I need more time under my belt and a app on the marketplace.
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