IOS App Development

Mobile app development: Android vs iOS

To an inexperienced eye, creating Android or iOS apps may seem the same but the truth is that each operating system has its own peculiarities and the Android vs iOS challenge is one of the most aggressive ever. But what are the differences in creating Android and iOS apps?

The differences are not only on a technical level, but also on a design and mobile strategy level. In other words, the complete design of the app must be related and dependent on the operating system. App developers who switch from one operating system to another, using a totally different programming language, will surely notice the differences.

The programming language

Since the two operating systems are different, the apps are programmed with distinct programming languages. Objective-C / Swift language is used for iOS app development, while Android app development requires Java.

Testing

The testing phase is essential in the development of mobile apps, games or any other type of software. This phase serves to ascertain that our development works perfectly, using the iOS simulator and the Android emulator.

The differences that we can appreciate are that the iOS simulator is much faster than its equivalent for Android, with the advantage, however, that the Android emulator is a virtual machine with a virtualized CPU, which makes it more realistic than the one for iOS. The iOS simulator, in fact, often fails to give realistic and exact representations of Apple devices.

Graphic interface

Here we are at the visual differences in the development of Android and iOS apps. Technically, the developer will build XML files on Android interfaces. These are very similar to iOS XIB files.

The quality of the animations in iOS is better than those of Android. Google tried to correct this difference in the preview of Android L by creating a new trend for app design, known as Material Design. Meanwhile, Apple has always focused on soft, complex and powerful animations, carefully taking care of the aesthetics and user experience. Google, on the contrary, has decided to focus on the hardware part with respect to these aspects.