It is an old debate, which mobile OS platform is a better option for startups, iOS or Android? Giving complete answer is impractical without looking in-depth into the technicality, marketing factors, UX, and much more aspects influencing the app success. SysBunny consulting service tries to help app startups to fix an appropriate decision.
Table of Contents
Introduction:
Android vs. iOS debate is one of the many unending debates in the software development niche. However, market trends and history reveal that mobile iPhone app developers lean towards iOS app development rather than Android despite its rocking numbers of apps in the market and usage of Android devices. If we approach the issue systematically, we can find out the truth behind it. Let’s start.
Reason 1: Demographics
Android has a vast and ubiquitous user demographics compared to iOS/Apple platform. Apple fans are mostly located in the developed and affluent nations of the world. Therefore, a vast gap exists between two platforms when we consider the purchasing power of the users for everything right from high-end devices, connectivity, spending on apps, and most importantly app usage for a diverse range of needs and use cases.
Users of iOS apps are more experimental and ready to afford the innovative apps. Therefore, mobile app developers see higher revenue, higher adoption, and higher active users on iOS than Android platform.
Reason 2: Revenue Model
Mobile app monetization strategy is vital for any developer or app startup to adopt one or more revenue models. Thanks to Google as the Aka of Android and open source nature of the platform, Android apps are available as freemium (Ads supported) more than paid apps.
Contrary Apple is a proprietary platform, and its natural tendency is to support paid apps to earn more out of the investment. Therefore, iOS app is more paid, and freemium apps are less also with in-app purchase features to encourage paid app selling at the end.
Thus, iOS apps become the cause of more revenue streams than Android for developers and app startups.
Reason 3: Fragmentation
Being a proprietary platform, Apple has established its hold on hardware part of the app ecosystem too. Therefore, iOS devices and its release cycle are under the hood of Apple. Moreover, it synchronizes the iOS version release with the device release, and it hardly goes more than one release within a year.
Thus, iOS developers have to face fragmentations issues on hardware and OS part lesser than the Android developers.
Android app ecosystem is suffering heavily from hardware as well as operating system fronts. Being an open platform, Aka of Android, Google and Alliance have no control over hardware side as well as OS parts to control the versioning fragmentation. It means, unlike Apple, Google cannot forcefully withdraw the support for previous versions of Android OS.
Thus, fragmentation issues make the life of Android developer daunting when testing, quality control, and compatibility come into question. In short, fragmentation increases the overall development cost and decrease the revenue stream that should come from a vast audience.
Reason 4: User Experiences
The motto of Apple Inc. is to win its user base based on providing the excellent user experiences by leveraging tech innovations. Therefore, iOS ecosystem has everything focused on UX be it devices, OS, or marketplace services. Thus, Apple has built the entire iOS ecosystem by placing UX at the center, and that is proving amazingly successful today and lure app developers explicitly higher than Android ecosystem.
Reason 5: App Marketplace
App startups always look for security of their investment and high return. Fortunately, iOS ecosystem is revolving around the same principles and provide highly secure marketplace (Apple iTunes Store) with strict rules, regulations, monetization models, and quality controls.
These things are a nightmare for Android platform despite vigorous measures taken by Google to improve the reputations and revenues of Google Play Store. Therefore, iOS apps are more stable and secure against hacking and other malicious elements to deteriorate UX and data security like highly sensitive matters.
App design, programming, deployment, and marketing rules are far better and stricter in iOS platform than Android. These all are forming a highly conductive and secure environment for iOS developers and become the cause of higher and steady revenue stream for iOS developers.
Conclusion:
Mobile app developers prefer iOS app development first when they have to choose out of two options, iOS vs. Android platform. App success depends on several key factors like target audience and its demographics, devices preferences, financial status, and activeness of its users.
Therefore, if you are an app startup and indulging in a dilemma when deciding between iOS and Android platform to give priority, you must have a good app consultant at your side, and that is SysBunny, and its iPhone app development company strive to serve the needy app developers as well as app entrepreneurs. Let’s talk about your next mobile app development project and decide the first mobile OS platform to go.
