Android or iOS: Which version has more future?

[Captain Planet]

Hello everyone,

I've been using Pleco for WM since time immemorial, but the moment has come to finally retire my HTC Touch HD (a Windows Mobile 6.x device).

As far as I can remember, I purchased basically all the dictionary add-ons that were available at the time, so it's great that licences can be transferred -- thanks PlecoSoft for allowing that!

Now, I have the choice of either switching to the iOS version on my iPad 2, or the Android version on the Nexus 4 I will buy next week (or whatever it is updated to after the Google developer event).

• Which one should I choose and why?
• Is any of the two versions "better" (i.e. more features, more flexible in what you can do with it), or are they roughly equivalent?
• And (a question particularly to Mike Love if I may) which version is the focus of future development? I would prefer a more future-proof solution.

Some considerations:

1. Ceteris paribus, the Android version has the advantage that I carry my phone with me most of the time.
2. On the iPad, I'm still on (jailbroken) iOS 5.1.1, and wouldn't want to upgrade in the foreseeable future (for Google Maps and Adblock). I know some apps are starting to require iOS 6. Would there be any compatibility issues now or in the future?

 

[mikelove]

The tricky stuff is all being done in cross-platform code, so pretty much anything happening below the level of UI - search engine / flashcard algorithm improvements, new types of data (synonym / antonym lists), our new text-to-speech system, etc - are likely to show up on both platforms. Android will probably get a lot of those cross-platform features first, because it's much easier to test them on Android and it's less nerve-wracking to release new code on Android (since we can release bug fixes within a few hours, versus the week it takes Apple to approve them), but features that are built mostly in platform-specific code are likely to show up first on iOS, since it makes us 3x as much money as Android.

Also, as of its next update iOS is likely to have a significant UI advantage over Android, and it's likely to retain that for a while, for a couple of reasons:

a) Version consistency - Android 2.x and Android 4.x are hugely different beasts UI-wise, and we have too many customers on Android 2.x to drop support for it. So until that changes it'll be very difficult for us to do everything we'd like to do with UI.
b) Hardware consistency - a standard Android versus iOS argument, but a very true one; on iOS we have far fewer screen sizes / densities to deal with, making UI optimization much easier, and we also don't have manufacturers mucking around with the stock UI in ways that cause problems for us.
c) Better font renderer - interesting typography looks terrible on Android; that may change in Android 5 (thanks in part to a recent contribution of better anti-aliasing code to the FreeType font rendering library that they use), but it'll likely be at least a year or two before those changes are widely available to the point that we can start building around them.
d) Money, again - iOS is generating a lot more revenue, so we can afford to spend more time refining its UI and can also more readily justify hiring outside designers to help with bits of it.

But I wouldn't say either platform is the "focus of future development." iOS gets a certain amount of extra attention because it makes us more money - if iOS sales went away we'd go out of business (or at least we'd have to radically scale things back), if Android sales went away it would hurt us but we'd probably be OK. But we actually get more downloads on Android, and for long-term "platform" purposes we can't really afford to give up on that either.

We're probably going to require iOS 6 in our next update, though - not enough people left on iOS 5 to justify supporting it; most of the holdouts seem to have switched after Google launched their own Maps app. Also, it's strongly rumored that Apple and Google's agreement for using Google Maps in Apple's own Maps app will be ending this summer, which might mean that any device still running OS 5 would lose access to maps without an upgrade, thinning the ranks of OS 5 users further.

 

[Captain Planet]

Mike Love, thank you for such a detailed answer! Gives me a lot to think about.

Will it be possible to transfer my legacy WM licence again later between iOS and Android should the circumstances change, or is a one-way/one-time only option?

 

[mikelove]

Mike Love, thank you for such a detailed answer! Gives me a lot to think about.

Will it be possible to transfer my legacy WM licence again later between iOS and Android should the circumstances change, or is a one-way/one-time only option?

You can always change your mind at least once, but you can't keep going back and forth indefinitely. An advantage to going iOS first is that it's very easy to transfer items originally purchased on iOS to Android (in fact, you can even keep using them on iOS), while transferring items originally purchased on Android to iOS is impossible - all we can do is refund your Android purchase after you buy the iOS equivalent.