Why Are There So Many iOS-Only Apps?

33:11Apple, through virtue of having so few devices that they both you can build apps you can only build apps on mac so that's very controlled you can only deploy to a few devices that's very controlled they have this very controlled ecosystem um that allows them to have a very refined developer experience you download xcode you type some code you compile it you know bob's your uncle on android like it was it was very tricky like the back when i last tried there was like two different android uh idees you could like like text editors you could choose from and then from then like the you know there's like 17 million devices you could choose from to like emulate it on and the emulator was really slow and it's like there's this like fragmentation that exists that um is very intimidating like yes you have to like buy the hardware and then you have to buy the the developer fee and you're paying for that and you have to use their program and everything like that but like once you get over that hurdle and you're just like in that ecosystem coding for the iphone is like so easy i found it interesting because i hadn't really thought of it in that way i guess i'm like wired to instantly recoil from like anything that provides that much guidance.

34:14But it turns out that when you're building a complicated program, having the like guiding hand of Craig Federighi is actually kind of helpful. But Christian brought up another point, which is fragmentation. And you mentioned this at the beginning too. You hear it all the time when it comes to Android software and there's just too many devices and they all handle things slightly differently. Whereas Apple only has like, what, 20 devices or something like that, like in total. So I called up Curtis Herbert, who's a developer that has an app called Slopes, which is pretty successful and works on both iOS and Android.

34:44So just as an example of one of the biggest headaches that he's run into while maintaining apps for both Android and iOS is the Samsung battery saving mode. The screen size is not the problem. This has actually been a huge point for Slopes on Android is the device differences. And the problem often isn't the UI, it's everything else. So a great example is battery savers. There was actually a website out there, I forget the URL, but it was listing all the Android devices and basically how aggressive they were at killing apps for battery-saving purposes. Samsung was at the top of this list forever.

35:21So a great example would be you're recording with slopes, you're using the GPS, you're clearly signaling to the system, hey, we're doing something that the user cares about here. Samsung wouldn't care. It would go in and just keep quitting slopes throughout the day and we'd have to have all kinds of help articles for like here's how to go in for like this hardware device and kill the battery saver or change the settings for slopes so that hopefully it keeps it alive and then for this manufacturer here's how to do this it's just the fact that they would install so much other software like ios we can just it works the same on every iPhone iOS works the same Android is not that story depending on the manufacturer you come from they're going to have all kinds of custom tweaks and settings and all these things they do differently and that can make life really hard yeah my task manager app tick tick it has a function that it can remind you of a notification for a task at some point at a specific date and time but it says hey just to make sure this works because it might not work on every single Android phone, go into the settings and disable the battery saver function of this app and blah, blah, blah.

36:31And it kind of gives you vague instructions to hopefully be generic for every Android phone, but you have to go in and do that to guarantee you get the notification for the feature to work. Oh my God. It just works on the iPhone. Yeah. That's one of those things. Interesting. Yeah. So that kind of fragmentation makes it a little bit more difficult and intimidating for iOS engineers to dip their tone into the Android side of things. And then on top of that, Curtis said that a lot of his Android users just kind of expect the Android version of the app to not be a top priority. And so that's actually one thing that's also been a challenge on the Android side of the house has been we've definitely noticed Android users are challenging because they are so used to being treated like the second class citizens of mobile phones.

37:13And so we've noticed the default assumption for a lot of them is that we don't care about Android and we're just phoning it in because so many apps do it that way. And we're genuinely trying. And like a good example was last September, you know, we always have when iOS comes out in September, we always have support for the new features and all that kind of stuff. And we launch with a couple features alongside iOS. And right away on Instagram, we get some Android users like, oh, well, there you go. Not caring about Android again. It's like it's iOS launch day like of course we're gonna have an ios update what do you expect here um and we've had users write in and be like oh it's really frustrating you don't care about android it's like we have four years of constantly shipping updates and constantly trying to do right by the platform and yeah ios is going to be a little bit ahead of android just because i am the founder of the company i'm an ios developer i don't sleep i just write this code because it's my hobby and like i don't expect my android engineer to keep up with me in that regard that would be unfair um so like yeah there's an unfair advantage there but we try really hard to launch features at the same time when we can to not hold back android like android is constantly getting stuff and we're trying so hard to do it right and like when we reply to people and we're like hey you know we're a small team one ios engineer now two finally um but one ios engineer back then and one Android engineer, like, give us a break.

38:47They're like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. We just assumed like everyone else does it this way. But real quick, going back to the point about Android fragmentation, that doesn't just apply to the hardware or the software of the phones. It also applies to the design. There's also this other aspect of it, which is that I think Android is like very fragmented, both as like an operating system, like how many devices it supports, but also as like a design aesthetic. And maybe this is just like the kinds of folks who build apps for iOS are naturally just more sort of like interested in the design. Yeah.

39:22Then they just care a little bit more about the, and this is not to say that like internet engineers don't care about it, but maybe like on average, I think like folks who use iPhones are a little bit more like, or developer iPhones are a little bit more interested in like the aesthetics of the product. And then I think also iOS and like the design language for just Apple, I guess, in general is very clean, very polished. And I think they have a lot of stuff that makes it easier for people to plug and play. And I think Android is trying to get to, like Google is trying to get to that stage. Maybe a good example of this is like Material 3 is, you know, like they're pushing really hard on like trying to get Material 3 to be like sort of the common way that developers think about design.

40:07And that I think is a hope at making sure that like the experiences can get to that polish without the kind of investment that Android needs right now. So like in your head, if you had to pick YouTubers, one of them was, yeah, one of them represents an iOS developer and one of them represents an Android developer. Do you have any of mine? I have two. Michael Reeves is Android. That's a great one. Michael Reeves is definitely true. That's why I love him so much. Although he probably, he probably uses iPhone. He might use iPhone. Totally, but his videos are Android. Yeah. His videos are Android.

40:39Whistle and diesel is Android. Um, who's an iPhone? God. Dave2D is an iPhone. Oh, sure. Yeah. That's a good one. I can see that. Clean. Very aesthetic. That's fair. Yeah. Maybe unbox therapy. Very, very, the consistent aesthetic is important. Yeah. I would argue if he wants to do that, unbox would be Android because it's like a just do it live. Like pure aesthetics. Yeah. Pure aesthetically. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, totally style wise. What about like Zach from JerryRigEverything? thing that feels hmm that feels more android because of what he's doing in the video so he's taking things apart putting it back together i also had him as an android developer in my head totally what about olier that would be an iphone yep yes that would be an iphone right that's just like the it feels right yeah those are like the vibes yeah the vibes that's who i picture so let's be real aesthetics are important and in this age of apple that we're living in there's an entire generation of engineers and product designers who were raised in the Apple way of doing things and the overall Apple aesthetic.

41:45You know, straight lines, minimal, elegant, simple, aluminum. Can I just throw something out there? You may. I think the main reason I do not use an iPhone is because of the aesthetics. Really? I, and up until recently they let you do it, but I like a very blank home screen. You could not do that on an iPhone. I thought it was super annoying i don't know why everyone likes a cool background and then 40 like app icons on their home page yeah that seemed terrible to me what do you have on your on your home screen right now it's just my dock a clock and the like search bar you could kind of do that you can now yeah that's like only in the most recent yeah you can kind of do it yeah yeah interesting so yeah so it's like it's kind of part aesthetics part customization because they could lock you into an aesthetic But if you don't like the aesthetic, it's not great.

42:35So if you have customization, you can change it to your own aesthetic. Duh. And not only the aesthetics of Apple drive people in, unless you're Andrew, but also if you're an iOS developer, you can just like also make more money on that platform. So it's kind of like these two driving forces that are leading everyone to just like start developing on iOS. But Curtis, the guy that I spoke with that has both apps, he actually really likes material design and what Google is doing right now. So that might not always be the case because that is a different aesthetic that Google has been like consistent with.

43:07I don't know. I would push back on keeping up design wise with Apple. Like I think they're doing their own thing. And I definitely have respect for material. I feel like once we got to like the last three years of material design, it's really started to click for me. I like it as a design language. I'm still an iOS guy. I like Apple's design language, but I definitely feel like material is headed in the right direction and i i like it now i like what we can do with it do they even call it material you anymore material you yeah i don't remember them saying that i think that's just as of like 14 yeah i don't think they've like announced anything in that way like we have a new thing but that's kind of the point that's the good thing credits was saying that like one of the things that people who develop for ios really value about apple is the consistency and the stability of like Their design is their design for years.

43:59Google will just change it up and be like, that thing you were just doing for two years? Never mind, we're on this now. And with Material U, right? Android 12, by the way. Android 12, okay. That's like, it's been how many years now? And they're still going with it. It's consistent. And that is going to start the ball rolling down the hill and keep the momentum moving forward. It'll change this year. Calling it. Because you said that. Dude, if that happens, oh my God, I hope not. I like Material U. Yeah. I do too. Yeah. I'm gonna blame you if that happens. I'm gonna bring this up. Hiroshi's watching this like...

44:33I got him. Material U is one of my favorite design aesthetics, and I miss my Pixel every day. But, that said, it seems like Android really has an identity moving forward. It has its own aesthetic now with Material U. A more natural, curvy, whimsical feel that some people can relate to in the same way that there are those that relate to the minimal Apple aesthetic. But anyway, that's just about design. And this episode is about why there are so many iOS exclusive apps. So what is it about fragmentation that causes iOS developers to not want to cross over to the Android side of things? I mean, Android developers deal with fragmentation all the time.

45:10You know, it can't be that big of a problem. So also with fragmentation, one of the things that they mentioned, specifically Christian, Christian was saying, even if they nail the developer tooling ecosystem, which I don't think they have and neither is apple to be fair but like you also get this this additional aspect once you're done where holy crap like the the user base you're deploying to is not like a holistic um they're all on the same page like ios within six months of like the new ios version coming out you can be damn sure the vast majority of people are on it um so if there's a cool new dynamic island api um or a new like notifications api or something that you want to play with probably everyone's going to get it and that's a cool thing to build an experience around Android like it's much more um jagged and fragmented which is a you know word that's been abused over the years but like it's that new feature you're building the phones that get Android 20 or whatever on now might not get that in in aggregate and majority for you know three four years um so that feature you're building now that you're super hyped about like what five percent of your users on pixel phones might get it like that's not super exciting to develop for on top of that like when you develop for it and you optimize for that feature and it's out not even for the dynamic island but just for a new version of ios that will hit hundreds of millions of people that next week yep uh the stat in front of me right now on apple's website is 76 of all iphones introduced in the past four years are on the latest version ios 18 that's crazy i'm sure if you found the android stat it would be like how many android phones right now are on yeah not a lot not that many yeah s25s oneplus 13s pixels that might be it maybe so yeah you get that instant turnaround of like hundreds of millions of people having the newest feature and that was one of christian's like biggest points was that you get this like positive feedback loop of like i just worked on this thing for a month the day it comes out on everyone's phones now my app like supports it and he's getting all this feedback on social media and it's like a big community of people celebrating like this new thing that he just worked so hard on yeah versus on android you don't really get that yeah pixel users will eat it up though i got the latest version, I'm on top of it, and I love that.

47:17Yeah, but then Samsung users have to wait like three years until they're new. I just left up on 14. Yeah, so yeah, that's going to be true. Yeah. So it seems to me that developer lock-in is pretty real, but not for the technical reasons that I originally thought. And it has a lot more to do with how you see yourself and what kind of developer you aspire to be. After the break, things will get a little bit more technical, but don't worry, it'll still basically be an Apple versus Android slugfest. I know that's what you're here for.

47:55Mercury knows that to an entrepreneur, every financial move means more. An international wire means working with the best contractors on any continent. A credit card on day one means creating an ad campaign on day two. And a business loan means loading up on inventory for Black Friday. That's why Mercury offers banking that does more, all in one place, so that doing just about anything with your money feels effortless. Visit Mercury.com to learn more. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC.

48:34The pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. Crafted with our signature espresso and real pumpkin sauce. then topped with whipped cream, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The PSL. Get it while it's hot or iced. Only at Starbucks. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to-do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs.

49:10Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

49:15Okay, welcome back. So I'm calling this section the Porque no los dos section, or why not both? Because if I have an idea for an app and I think it's a killer idea, why should I have to choose Android or Apple? Why can't I do both? There has to be some way to do both, right? Well, luckily, there is. But this is where things get a little technical. So I think we have a pretty decent idea of why people initially choose to build for iOS. You recently released an app. What was it called again? It's called Panels. Panels. That's what it was. Panels. Why did you choose to hit them both at the same time instead of doing one and then double back and do the other?

49:54For us, it was specifically because we know our audience is split pretty evenly. So we know lots of people use iPhone who watch us. We knew lots of people use Android who watch us. and launching on one and not the other would feel like we're just missing part of our audience there. So we just wanted to do both. Okay. It would have been way easier to only do one. Way easier to just do one. Facts. Yes. We probably would have made some money off it too if we only did one. Yeah. There are tools like React Native from Facebook or I guess Meta now, Kotlin Multiplatform from JetBrains, and Flutter from Google.

50:26These are all open source things that will allow you to do just that, to write code once and then export for Apple iOS and even web. Kind of. I mean, I'm sure it's a little bit more difficult than that, but that's pretty much the gist of it. So keep that in mind for this part of the conversation. I have three, three, two, three, three theories as to why this is the case. Okay. All right. One, your app takes off, but it still demands a lot of your time and money. Apollo for Reddit falls under this category. I asked Christian when we were talking, you know, Reddit is just like a website and Apollo was like taking the information from that website.

51:00and displaying it why not make a web app as well like this could have just been like another website you know he could have had the app and a website why not both for one thing like with with a web app you're kind of targeting like um the lowest common denominator like it's a very not necessarily in a negative way but it's a very non-tailored experience and a big thing with apollo that people were excited about was like this is this is not a cross-platform app it's an app that feels like an ios like app like if you're familiar at all with ios and you like the technology this is going to feel tailored toward your device and that resonated with a lot of people whereas I think just being like this is like every other web app you navigate to is less of like oh I feel special using this but then I spoke with Curtis who did exactly what I wish more developers would do which is he launched an iOS app called slopes it was pretty successful he was able to like make it his main thing and then a couple years later he was like you know there's this whole other market of Android developers or Android developers Android users that I should try to hit.

51:58And he went back and hired an Android developer. I mean, it was a challenge finding a great Android engineer that could kind of take the lead on that. One that, I mean, at that point, so Slopes is 100 % bootstrapped. We've never taken VC money. This has just been growing over time. So we couldn't throw San Francisco money out there. So finding a good engineer that could be a senior engineer, hands off, and could kind of take the lead on cloning the iOS app. So context, I'm a longtime Apple user, love the platform. We did it on iOS native. And I wanted to make sure that when we did Android, we showed similar respect to those users.

52:39So we are Kotlin, we are material design. There was no cross-platform here. And there was a slew of contractors out there that could help us launch a React app or something like that. But battery life is kind of important when you're skiing. You need to make sure the app actually runs all day. And React isn't the easiest on battery life. So we want to make sure that, you know, we did right by the platform, just like we're trying to do for iOS. And so finding an engineer that kind of checked all those boxes was a challenge. And then cloning the iOS app was a lot of work. So we had to rewrite everything.

53:15But it was a challenge. It took well over a year to really get there. And even that took a year to build with like some guy that he hired who knew exactly what he was doing. Can't relate. The second category is you are successful enough that you think you can build your own Android app, but it's just not as fulfilling or worse. It's just more difficult than you expected. I think that's way more important than people give credit to. The developer experience. The developer. I mean, like Christian's making that because he is an iOS user and it was fun for him. and the reason the app is probably so successful is because he had a good time building that app like think about what marquez says to people aspiring to be youtubers for ever he's always said this is like if you have fun making the videos and genuinely enjoying making them better the viewers are something that might come in but like you never have to worry about your view count if you just enjoy making it so like if he enjoyed making apollo and then went to go make it on android and didn't have a good time it's probably gonna be a garbage app yeah and then just stressful all of the time.

54:19Yeah, that's fair. And it's like, what are your goals with the app? Are your goals to reach the most number of people and have the largest audience possible? Then it might make sense to do an Android app. If your goal is to have fun, make a living and make the best app you can in this refined environment, maybe then it's just one platform. Yeah. Like it really does depend on how also you kind of see yourself. I feel like earlier when we were talking about which YouTubers kind of represent which, that's like a very particular aesthetic that I think people like align themselves with so if you see yourself as one kind of person you're going to be drawn towards that device and that operating system and that aesthetic and then that's who you're going to be developing for you know um but it also works in reverse oddly enough because karn made an android app and then it was pretty successful and he was like you know what i'm going to bring this over to ios and he tried doing that and just completely lost passion for it because it's like it's not how he interacts with the technology like you know what i always think about and no shade to vimeo but vimeo still exists i'll throw the shade at vimeo i've followed vimeo over the years vimeo only still exists because when you had to put licensed music on like a cool highlight video youtube took it off so you threw it on vimeo instead that's literally how it started yeah i have that here so it's like i feel like youtube for online video streaming is the dominant winner you know like that is in my eyes i i don't even know would that be android or ios vimeo youtube youtube would be i guess both because it was short form or long form long form yeah ios okay interesting yeah yeah so i just feel like it's been such the dominant winner but like whenever i find a random i don't know documentary maker or something and i go to see their reel it's always on vimeo or like a random brand thing is always on vimeo i never like click in and see their like youtube channel unless they're youtubers trying to be youtubers so like i feel like that professional real aesthetic or youtuber kind of like i create videos to be creative aesthetic are like the two things that drive people to those two platforms what would make you want to upload to vimeo nothing today yeah right now vimeo has an announcement and you're like hmm i should do that it would be something where i specifically don't want to put it on youtube it would have to be really specific because that's kind of how i i'm thinking like ios developers feel sure yeah yeah you know yeah i don't know maybe vimeo doesn't have as many upsides as as the comparison but we keep saying fragmentation but uh this being like both an upside and an achilles heel it's really choice like on android you have choice you can get a 1300 flagship with the most incredible specs and cameras and screens you can get a 150 phone that does these things that you like or anywhere in between and there's a phone at every single price point with every single set of features and you have that incredible choice that's the upside the downside is those phones and those companies are all managed very differently and are all updating at different rates and are all scaled differently in different resolutions different os numbers and on the other side of the fence there's the iphone which has what four models five models right now something like that and way less choice but way more locked in as far as behind the scenes development the ability to update them all at once that sort of thing so it's the Achilles heel of Android but it is kind of why we love it so let's say you're building an Android app unless you start the project with the idea in mind that you're going to go both to Android and to iOS doing a complete rebuild of that app in a different language can be like an insane amount of work I kind of thought of it like because they kept telling me this and I didn't really like click it together and I was like I don't see it like I don't know why it would be that much more work and then i thought of like okay what if i wanted to reproduce this podcast for vimeo and for youtube like that would be an insane amount of work we'd have to re-record everything twice which we've done before but i it's not fun let's not do the roi is not as high yeah exactly um i feel like doing that is have you ever played prestige mode in call of duty where you just like you get all the way to your highest level you unlock everything and then you start literally from zero just so you can get like a new icon on the end of your level but you have to unlock all the guns again and everything god that's kind of what it sounds like you're like i built my app now i'm at the back when i played call of duty it was 55 i got to 55 i have every gun unlocked yeah i'm gonna start over just so the next time i'm at 55 there's like two stars next to it oh my god that's crazy there's no the the benefit that is you have two apps i guess but like those first few levels are brutal.

59:09So yeah, it turns out if you don't start out building your app with the intention of going to both platforms, doing an entire rebuild is pretty expensive and really difficult. Even a company as big as Notion had to really think about whether or not they wanted to invest the time and resources to rebuilding their app from scratch, basically, in order to make parts of it native. Not even all of it, parts of it. One thing, I forget who it was, maybe it was when I was doing my research, but something that someone brought up that I found really interesting was you also don't know if it's going to work when you do this like you don't know if it's going to succeed just because you like invested in an android engineer to like come and do this thing just because you popped off on instagram doesn't mean it's going to work on youtube facts you know yeah so it always comes back to like why play with fire like if you play it safe and you just stay with the platform you're already on you can just like keep winning in your way and I think that like that block is what's causing a lot of iOS apps to not make its way over to Android people are like it's fine here like I'm doing good I don't need to go over there you could think of waveform the audio podcast when it launched where we started from the beginning we made an audio podcast we had a very small amount of things we had to hit because it was only our voices yeah and then we had to relaunch the video podcast at some point which now you know it might not even work as a video podcast there's so many more variables onto like what is on the screen what our set is what our lighting is how many people the employees you had to hire me and Ellis we literally like had to hire more people to do it it's it was successful and the audio stuff is still doing great but like the audio was very simple they get it at 4am still every day the video we had to change launch times because there's so many more variables yeah things have changed a lot wait this is people actually watch this?

1:00:58we're on camera? I should start brushing my hair. I thought this was just for funsies. Wait, you guys get paid? So the third category of you have an iOS app and you're like, you know, trying to dabble in the Android side of things. If your app is successful, you will need Android engineers, which is something that Karin said. And I found that super compelling. Because if you think about like the giant apps, Facebook, Instagram, Notion, they all have both. Especially because the goals are different because they need to reach as many people as possible. And if you're leaving one out, you're messing it up.

1:01:32So you have to invest in both and being everywhere. I think a lot of the really cool Android-only apps are the ones that... Name one. Well, I can't name them.

1:01:46But I would imagine that they're the ones that let you do things that Apple doesn't let you have access to. Like all of the battery optimizer. Nova Launcher, stuff like that. I don't know what that is. Oh, that's the Salmon Cannon at the National Parks. The Launcher. Nova Launcher. Oh, my God. Get it? Get it? Worst puns. Get it? But you know what I mean? Like the battery optimizer sort of ones or like the ones that give you access to the sound card to put like really advanced EQs across like the entire headphone. Yeah. I was about to say headphone jack. The audio spectrum. Yeah, but you know what I mean?

1:02:24like yeah those kind of like apps that they become popular because they can only be on android it's less so that they are good popular apps not that they're not because nova launcher is like my favorite thing i just downloaded it yes what what is really launcher nova launcher is yeah damn you sound like such an iphone user it's it lets you like change the themes and like how things work okay you can like completely change your home screen your home screen layout how things behave drawers and like all sorts of different things the settings and the like real deep phone things are the same that depends manufacturer to manufacturer but like the aesthetic of it you can completely customize so one of the main reasons i wanted to talk to all these developers in this episode specifically is because there are technologies you can use that will just automatically post to both and i say automatically it's not automatic you do have to do some work but you don't have to like rewrite the whole code base like there's this thing react native It's open source made by Facebook or I guess Meta now.

1:03:23There's Flutter, which is by Google. And the whole benefit, the whole point of this is you can write your code in like JavaScript, just like a regular language. And then you hit like basically export and it pops out to Apple or two apps, one for Apple, one for Android. I imagine that this works about as well as Google Translate. Damn. You know what I mean? Yeah. It'll get the gist. it'll get probably the function of the sentence you're trying to say but it probably won't be grammatically perfect is this about what panels is in i think panels is kotlin multi-platform okay i think and then i just don't want to the translation yeah yeah so the translation it's like if you just hit translate and then just go this is it then you'll have a not that great app but we've translated and then developed both independently after the translation so we didn't build it from scratch for both.

1:04:15But we, yeah, that's the difference. So Curtis had a really interesting analogy that kind of blew my mind. The way I look at it is those tools are great in some situations. The best way I usually explain it to non-developers, but have like maybe some sense of at least the internet, is like WordPress is a great platform, but you don't want to build every website on WordPress. For some people, it makes a ton of sense. A restaurant, you don't need a custom website backend with all these things. WordPress is going to be great. But when you're trying to build some backend web application that people are going to log into and do all these things on, you're going to start tailoring limits of WordPress and what it can do.

1:04:56And React is very much the same way. It's going to be great for a lot of apps that are out there, but there's going to be a lot of apps out there that it just doesn't make sense for. And especially as you get more and more deeply connected to the hardware, or you're trying to do more and more custom things, you're going to be hitting the limits of you're going to be hacking around React almost as much work as it's going to be to just write it native at that point. Yeah, so it's, it's a good technology, it has its use cases, but like every technology, it has its trade offs. But I found it really interesting, because for me, that kind of solves the problem.

1:05:32Like, unless you have a very specific use case, why wouldn't you use both of these, right? Like, you can just publish to everyone instead of like needing to hire two completely different teams of people and do all this thing. But apparently that does come with some drawbacks. So Christian, for example, was saying that you get a total win in that you have an experience on both platforms, which something existing on Android or something existing on iOS when it wouldn't otherwise is infinitely better than nothing. But the experience on each is not as great as it could have been if you developed it like wholly natively.

1:06:06like Pixel Pals, for instance, where you mentioned that was like Apple announced a new iPhone. I was like, oh, I can kind of like mess with the status bar APIs and get all that in. Whereas I don't even know if React Native has the proper mappings on day one to access all the status bar and dynamic island stuff. Whereas Apple obviously does. So I can hit the ground running, go really quick, build a really cool native experience around that. And the same is basically true with Android. The question of why not just use something like React Native or Flutter is an important question. And I think what it boils down to is kind of like your needs.

1:06:41Like what is your use case? So for like a simple application, you might want to do something like React Native or Flutter because you're just doing like what is effectively like reading and writing, making small edits. You can think of like a reservation app, for example, for your like local barber or whatever. and these apps lend themselves well to being like things that you can sort of deploy in these like cross-platform like ways that is a real sort of like consequence of using these like these types of technologies these cross-platform technologies is that they don't they sort of abstract away some of the the sort of low-level APIs that you have and and there's because there's a layer on top of it, you lose out on some of the performance.

1:07:32So even at like Notion, for example, one of the things that we do is we make these trade offs between like what is the right thing to turn native and what is the right thing to keep in like we use like WebViews in the background, but like other apps might do like Flutter or whatever, but or like React Native. So like you might want to like depending on what your use cases are and like whether you need the performance um those are the kinds of like trade-offs you'd make for for going native versus going to one of these cross-platform things i still wasn't personally super convinced after this i was like okay sure whatever that seems like a fair trade for me to have like my app everywhere and then christian told me a crazy story which was when he was building apollo he was trying to redo a certain like navigation movement like you know on all phones now basically when you swipe from left to right it like takes you back to like the main feed and he was doing that accidentally and he was like okay well to me the solve is pretty simple you just swipe from right to left like you do it in the opposite direction jump back into the thing you were just doing so i wanted to build that into apollo and it turns out you had to throw it like the entire navigation stack and rebuild it from scratch to implement it go in the other direction um because you anyway so but it was like oh my god the amount like i would i was taking like slow motion videos of like the iPhone and how it like the animation curve and trying to mimic that because there would be like such little details of like where the page underneath would slowly slide into frame at a different rate than the one on top would move and like you have to have a super close attention to detail to mimic these things and if the person building like the react native library three years ago doesn't necessarily have that attention to detail because they just want something that's cross-platform or worse ios 18.1 comes along and apple's like i'm gonna tweak that animation curve by 0.1 seconds um a native app would just adopt that automatically it would just get it for free react native you might have to go back and go oh crap if it's on ios 18.3 you know tweak the animation curve a little we'll have to go back and get the slow motion cameras again like it's it's this kind of like this race always to keep parody with something that's potentially always moving um and it definitely can create like this uncanny valley like i tried really hard to get it i would still get like some like 0.1 of users who would be like i can tell you're You're doing something here and I don't like it.

1:09:41Which sounds like a nightmare. Yeah. I could not imagine doing that. So all this led me to the conclusion that at least here in North America, Android is cooked, right? That's pretty much what we're getting at. People use iPhone from an early age. Those people grow up to eventually be developers that will then develop for iPhone or purchase on the iPhone app store. And then using these cross-platform tools is basically frowned upon for most use cases. But Karin brought up a really interesting point, that Android actually has a superpower in this AI boom that we're going through right now. One of the things that I think is going to be super exciting in the going near future, and I think where Android has a bit of a superpower, is in the integratedness of, or the connectedness of all the apps on your device.

1:10:24If you think about it, for a lot of people, as a developer, there's a privilege of having someone walk around with their app like take it with them to to go or yeah maybe a more modern example of this is like what apps are on your home screen that's a privilege right and you know everyone carries a lot of these apps on their phone and as as these devices become more and more connected there's a lot of like like need for for cross communication between apps and i think where the real opportunities and where i think like android is a little bit ahead is how much apps can talk to each other. You can get to a state where you could potentially replace Google Assistant or Bixby or whatever you're running on your device.

1:11:10And will there ever be a Siri replacement? Or will we have to wait for Siri to catch up to whatever the most up-to-date or latest voice assistant is? And so iOS is a little bit slower on these things just because they own it end-to-end. And whereas like Google has a little bit more flexibility and like they just expose the APIs and let developers run with it. So perplexity, I think he mentioned, had like this new assistant that he was super excited to try out. And he was like, you know, it's a cool new thing. I could just like install it on my phone. And I have the perplexity assistant. If that's the case for Apple, you have to wait for them to integrate it into Siri.

1:11:49And if the Apple intelligence rollout is any indication. Yeah, that's a great point. It doesn't look like it's going to be a huge, you know, needle jumping movement anytime soon. Yeah, it's not going to change rapidly. I keep coming back to this analogy of uploading content to different social media platforms. And that's like, if I were to recommend something right now, I think picking one platform and being native to it and being really good at it is a good idea. and if you upload that exact same thing let's say to from youtube you try to upload that to tiktok like the overlays are in a different place and like the ui you can't like point to the button the same way you did on youtube like you have to make more native content for that os it's it's always going to be more work to do it in more places yeah so that's not going to change anytime soon but yeah yeah the way it starts is just it's up to the developer yeah i feel like there will continue to be iOS only apps dominating the stores.

1:12:45But I at least have hoped that somewhere down the line, there will be some really cool Android only things that is going to make it more appealing. So between the AI is being able to do whatever they're about to be able to do in the next coming years, Google finally having a design language that like people are really getting behind and they're sticking with it and being consistent. So like the the aesthetics of it is attracting a certain kind of person. I think there could be a future in where that becomes desirable to be in that kind of like playing field and then all they got to do is get the money right because then we're all good if you can compete on apple the same way so to close out this apple versus android slugfest i asked each of our new developer friends to pick a side to try to recruit you the listener to be a mobile developer either for apple or for android here's what they had to say oh you're screwing me here um that i mean the the the political answer would be it would wholly depend on the app um i think if you're just like a one person team if you can call it that um and you're looking to develop something i i would say like ios if it's a very north american market that you're targeting um i would say like ios is definitely like a solid bet like you're gonna end up probably taking twice as long um it's gonna be twice as difficult just in terms of keeping your chickens in line to develop for two platforms whereas ios will let you get to like the majority of the market quicker um and and a more fruitful majority of the market um and at least let you see if this idea has legs um and then maybe if it does like explore other options at that point like maybe maybe you have an idea that you think would absolutely crush on android and and don't just you know throw away android just because you have some preconceived notion like look into it for sure um but i think for the get-go it's a hard argument to make to not just explore your idea on ios and see where that goes but again very biased building mobile apps is is an experience of its own i would say i think you know i started building out or these like games and then didn't like web stuff but there was something very tangible building something that showed up on your phone and you know like i mentioned that you have the privilege of caring with you in other places.

1:14:58When I first started building apps, one of the things I would do is I would just like scroll around in my own apps, just, just, you know, just like see what the experience is and, and just like, like obsess over some of the details. And you get a lot of that with, with, you know, being a mobile engineer and, you know, whether it's like a night and day difference between being like a web engineer or being a backend engineer, I don't know. I think that you can leave that to, to, to individuals themselves and, you know, just like let them, let him put it out of it but for me i think like being able to just like you know have an experience like google the google podcast app sort of like going away and then the next weekend being like oh like let me just i'm just gonna build it out i'm gonna build it out and it's gonna work and and just having that is such a rewarding part of being a mobile engineer and then you also get like i mean there's like other benefits of it which is like you don't have to like spin up your own infrastructure like your phone is your infrastructure like you know i don't have to have a back end for a lot of the stuff that i build and that's like super easy it's like if you want to do like something that like periodically fetches some some like price for like uh a trading card or like a video game or whatever whatever whatever it is um you can do that and just like have it run on your phone and carry your phone all the time with you it runs in the background and that's like super fun um you can make games you can i mean like just like it's endless just like the stuff you can do um and then also just like phones are getting a lot more powerful now And, you know, if I'm like not writing code, then I'm on my phone, right?

1:16:27Like you're scrolling, you're like most of your experiences are on your phone. And, you know, as much as there are, there's like space for like other types of like engineering. I mean, being a mobile engineer is like rewarding in its own way. I'm going to throw you a wild card here. I would say, as it probably came obvious from us talking, like start with iOS. But I would definitely say give Android a shot. If you think your niche exists on Android and you can target that market, I would say we need more apps trying to do right by Android users. Because Android users deserve great software, too.

1:17:06Like, that shouldn't be exclusive to Mac. And the Android platform has gotten a lot better from a development standpoint than it was in the early days compared to iOS. So start with iOS. But I would say it gives Android a serious look. It doesn't have to be choosing a side necessarily. You'll have to pick one to dedicate your resources to at first. If that's your situation, pick iOS. Sorry, easier to iterate. But when you get big enough, don't ignore Android. Test the water. See if you can do something there. And realize that just like iOS, it's going to take some time to get traction. It's going to take some time to get users that respect your app.

1:17:49It's not going to be an overnight success. Just because you have a successful iOS app, it's going to take years on Android, just like iOS probably did for you. But I would try more to convince people to give it a shot than to pick a side. And I can agree because I will be back on Android eventually at some point, I'm sure. By the time this episode goes out. By the time I edit this episode, I will have convinced myself to go back to Android. So thank you for joining me on this long journey of why there are so many iOS-only apps. Did we learn anything new? Who knows? Doesn't feel like it. I don't think so.

1:18:24I mean, I'm sure you knew that iOS users spend more, so there's more of an incentive there. And fragmentation on Android isn't exactly a secret, but I hadn't actually considered that there are full-grown teenagers and adults who are developing apps right now whose first experience was on iPhone, so that makes complete sense why they would be drawn to building for that platform. And personally, I completely underestimated how big a role design and overall aesthetic plays into all of this. But I have to say, I cannot stop thinking about what Karn said about Android having a superpower when it comes to this AI boom that we're having.

1:18:53I'm really curious to see if there are any really compelling Android-only apps just right around the corner. Though I guess if that ends up being the case then we'll just end up in the same problem but in reverse with people developing for Android instead of Apple and then we're back in square one. Anyway, Marques wants to leave you with a pun. The grass is greener on the Android side. Just saying. I was going to go the opposite, Rob. As an Android user. No. I think the thing that stuck to me the most is that like, we don't understand how many of these developers are small indie developers. And I really liked what Christian said of like, if you're working on that one thing you think is great, once you have to make for the other side, you're taking time away.

1:19:35So like the great Ron Swanson once said, never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing. Damn. Nice. Damn. That's hard. Yeah. But as an Android user, that really screws me over. So maybe half-assed two things. Nice. Waveform is produced by Adam Malina and Ellis Rovin. We're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network, and our intro-outro music was created by VayneSill.