Why is Android still the second platform developers work on?

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Droid Life reported on why Android is still the second platform developers work on.

Despite his love for Android, he and Martin were hesitant to launch on Android first:

“Everything we’ve read, every number we’ve seen shows that it’s really difficult to get people to pay for apps on Android. We didn’t think we could release a paid app on Android and create something sustainable enough to fund further development.”

But the bigger issue is getting the app to work on Android.

Dave Feldman, co-founder of Emu, a third party messaging app, actually bucked the trend of iOS first and launched Emu on Android in late 2012. By April of 2014 Emu was pulled from the Play Store and launched on iOS. Developing Emu for Android hit a lot of issues working with SMS/MMS, dealing with Eclipse, and, of course, device fragmentation.

Feldman told TechCrunch, “We were finding Android in general to be a slower platform to move on. There’s more time spent dealing with fragmentation bugs. There’s more time spent dealing with testing and debugging, and we would rather spend that time building new functionality.”

According to Feldman issues they faced with fragmentation were particularly perplexing:

“On a Galaxy S4 with Samsung’s Multi-Window feature enabled, Emu’s popup windows are squished by the keyboard. This doesn’t happen on the Galaxy S4 sold by Google, without Samsung’s software modifications; or with the Multi-Window feature on the Galaxy S3. We’ve investigated, but because it relates to Samsung-specific functionality, we probably can’t fix it without direct cooperation from them.”

“On some Galaxy Nexus phones, when you’re listening to Pandora and get a notification sound from Emu, Pandora’s volume drops. This doesn’t happen with other apps’ notifications, nor does it happen with streaming apps other than Pandora, nor does it happen on any other device.”

In other words, Android users are less willing to pay for apps and device fragmentation remains a big issue.

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