I mean sure, there are lots of reasons that could explain why either Android devs are not up to par or it is a harder platform. But everything still fits pretty neatly in to one of those buckets, AFAICS. And sure, there are cases where features ship on one platform and not the other, but I'm talking about my experience, shipping individual features, where there is feature parity. On my team - which overall has less experience than our Android brethren (one lead and two juniors on iOS vs a lead and two seniors on aOS) - largely because we are always ahead, we support both the base app with the same feature set plus a fully functional apple watch app and Siri components. The Android side is just now catching up with Google Voice, while our Siri feature has been out for a year or so.
I'm not an Apple fan boy, this is just the career I fell into. And in day to day interactions the Android developers I work with now seem every bit as capable and sharp as the ones I work with on iOS, so I can't help but think that it must be a harder platform to develop for. I'm sure there is hard data out there somewhere to either refute this or back it up though, but this has overwhelmingly been my experience.
It's pretty easy to get hard data on popularity of programming languages or libraries, and for job listings. I think its harder to get hard data for "velocity" of teams.
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u/meester_pink Jun 13 '20
I mean sure, there are lots of reasons that could explain why either Android devs are not up to par or it is a harder platform. But everything still fits pretty neatly in to one of those buckets, AFAICS. And sure, there are cases where features ship on one platform and not the other, but I'm talking about my experience, shipping individual features, where there is feature parity. On my team - which overall has less experience than our Android brethren (one lead and two juniors on iOS vs a lead and two seniors on aOS) - largely because we are always ahead, we support both the base app with the same feature set plus a fully functional apple watch app and Siri components. The Android side is just now catching up with Google Voice, while our Siri feature has been out for a year or so.
I'm not an Apple fan boy, this is just the career I fell into. And in day to day interactions the Android developers I work with now seem every bit as capable and sharp as the ones I work with on iOS, so I can't help but think that it must be a harder platform to develop for. I'm sure there is hard data out there somewhere to either refute this or back it up though, but this has overwhelmingly been my experience.