I was watching PG's interview on Bloomberg yesterday on he said that most YC startups choose to develop on iOS first then port it to Android. (I can't remember if he said he advises startups to do iOS first before Android).
We did choose to start with Android because it has more powerful APIs. We don't want to cut out half of the smartphone market though, so we'll get once we're happy with Android we'll move onto iOS.
The upside to Android is you can push fixes to market in a matter of hours - so you can iterate faster and worry less about accidentally pushing crippling bugs.
This is absolutely correct and I had forgotten about this huge advantage until you just mentioned it. We've been on a very aggressive release schedule, pushing major overhauls to the app every 2 weeks since we started in August. It definitely wouldn't have been possible to move as fast on iOS.
I can assure you that the process of iteration is horrible on iOS. It's awful to be in the situation having a team that is able to learn fast and develop improvements within days, but then having to wait a 7 day cycle for every new improvement or test. Plus from time to time Apple will just reject you - last weekend our update (a bug fix update!) was rejected because of a method name we were carrying for months. This is really not helping anybody, neither app developers nor users.
It's my understanding that some of the key features are not possible under iOS due to restrictions in the SDK, namely:
- Reception of SMS by the app and subsequent features (like automatically reading the SMS aloud) because iOS doesn't allow the app to either be notified of an SMS or to intercept SMSs before the other SMS-handling apps (like Android does)
- Sending an SMS directly from the phone programatically - as iOS demands that the SMS send form is presented to the user and then requires a button to be tapped. So you'd be reduced to sending via an SMS gateway using a data connection.
I'd really like to be wrong here as we're currently dealing with these limitations too, so if anyone has any counter experience, I'd love to know about it
Thanks! Curtis definitely deserves more credit than I do.
We haven't done iOS before and are aware of these kind of restrictions on SMS apps. We think we can come up with something that will get around them and offer just as good or almost as good of an experience on iOS, although we'll find out for sure when we get to iOS.
My guess is this is cannot be easily done on iOS.
Android's API has been more open than iOS.