While reading Android vs iOS: A Developer’s Perspective from the Whereoscope Blog, I realized a few things that I'd like to share about my own perspective on Android vs iOS development.
For me, the single biggest win of the Android platform is its openness. I don't just mean the freely available documentation (and source) for the platform, though that is a big part of it. What I mean more is the ability for a hobbyist like myself to get software running on the device itself. When I got my iPhone, the first thing I wanted to do with it was write an app for it. I was a bit late to the iPhone party, so the SDK was already out (in fact, the availability of the SDK was one of the final straws that convinced me to buy one), but I was extremely disappointed to find you had to sign up for a paid developer account before Apple would allow you to test software you were writing, even on a device you (ostensibly) own. I can see charging a fee before allowing developers to upload their app to Apple's servers for dissemination through the App Store, but I'd like the ability to fully test software I'm writing on the target device during the development process. And I don't want to start paying the $99/year tithe to Apple until I'm actually ready to start marketing the app.
When I bought my Android phone, I literally had a hello world app of my own running on the device in 15 minutes. Sure, there's a fee to Google in order to host your apps on the Marketplace just as there is to host apps on the App Store, but that fee can be paid by the developer when they're ready to market the application, after they're confident it works to their satisfaction when physically installed on a device. Also, if a developer wants to have friends beta test their application, it's as simple as walking them through a configuration setting change and pointing them at a URL. Finally, Android developers have the ability completely opt-out of the Marketplace and market/sell their applications completely independently, if they so choose. That's the sort of openness (and freedom) that I care about as a developer.
Regarding the observation that "the software is of lower quality, on average," on the Marketplace, I must say that I side with Google's approach to this as well. I'd rather have a wide open Marketplace with crowd-sourced quality control than have a single gatekeeper which is ostensibly in place purely for quality control reasons, but is free to reject or delay apps indefinitely with little to no reason given. And then there's patentgate... I'm just not comfortable entrusting Apple Inc. with ultimate authority over my work.
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