Why Are There So Many iOS-Only Apps?

It's time for a bonus episode! In this one, Adam tries to figure out why there are so many apps that are exclusive to iOS. He brings in Marques, Andrew, and Ellis to talk about some of the reasons he found by talking with developers. Special thanks to Christian Selig, Karn Saheb, and Curtis Herbert for lending their expertise! P. S - We're headed to Austin! If you're going to be at SXSW in March we'll be doing a live show so come say hi! Links: Christian Selig: - Website: https://christianselig.com/ - Threads: https://www.threads.net/@christianselig - Pixel Pals: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixel-pals-widget-pet-game/id6443919232 Karn Saheb: - Website: https://karn.io/ - Threads: https://www.threads.net/@karnsaheb - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/karn.io Curtis Herbert: - Website: https://curtisherbert.com/ - Slopes app: https://linktr.ee/getslopes - Threads: https://www.threads.net/@parrots01 Music provided by Epidemic Sound Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:26Speaker 01

  Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  I think a lot of the really cool Android-only apps are the ones that... Name one. Well, I can't name them.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  But I would imagine that they're the ones that let you do things that Apple doesn't let you have access to.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  What is up people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts, I'm Marquez.

• 1:58Andrew Manganelli?

  I'm Andrew.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  And I am Adam.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  And Adam is sitting where I'm normally sitting. And I don't make the rules, but I think that means you're hosting now.

• 2:07Speaker 04

  It's bonus episode time. I stole your seat. I took it.

• 2:11Andrew Manganelli?

  The drummer, that was an accident.

• 2:14Speaker 04

  It worked. Alice is still on the boards, thank God. Okay, so this episode is going to be all about why there are so many iOS apps. Why there are so many iOS only apps in particular. So, Marquez, you are famously a dual wielder of phones. You have Android, you have iPhone in both pockets at any given time.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  What are those two phones right now?

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Currently, it's the iPhone 16 Pro in, I guess it's just black, space black maybe. And then the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra in, I think they call it silver blue.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  That's a weird name.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Something like that.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  There's no way they call it silver blue, right?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  They do.

• 2:53Andrew Manganelli?

  I'm gonna look that up while we continue.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Okay, so in your experience, having two phones for the past, what, 10 years?

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  Are there any apps that you wish were on both devices? Or that you avoid using just because it's only on iOS only?

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Oh, constantly. Yeah. I mean, one of the things we've talked about is to-do list apps. And one of them will like float across my radar. And the first thing that I'll check is, is it iPhone only? Like, it happens a lot.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  So if it is, do you download it? Do you move forward?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  If it is, it makes me less likely to want to plunge and like really check it out. Because I know I spend a lot of time on the Android phone and I want to be able to use it on both.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's kind of a deal breaker for me if it is iPhone only.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  Andrew?

• 3:34Andrew Manganelli?

  First of all, it is called silver blue. There's also pink gold and white silver as different colors.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Wow, unbelievable.

• 3:41Andrew Manganelli?

  All one word.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  Turns out if you just like combine colors, you get new colors.

• 3:45Andrew Manganelli?

  Who'd have thought? Uh, no one.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  You've never had an iPhone?

• 3:48Andrew Manganelli?

  I've literally never been an iPhone user.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  And you just recently got an iPad mini?

• 3:53Andrew Manganelli?

  I did get an iPad mini.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Did you install any apps on the iPad mini that you've been hearing everyone talk about that were iOS only?

• 3:59Andrew Manganelli?

  Every single app on my iPad is like... Probably a Google Forward app. Like, everything I downloaded was a lot of things just on my phone already that I have than the iPad version up for a bigger screen and.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  So you're using your iPad mini as like a conduit for Google services?

• 4:16Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, it's like, I really like it to like walk around the office and have Google Tasks on, which is terrible on the iPad. And like, stuff like, stuff like that.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  Nice. What phone are you using right now?

• 4:26Andrew Manganelli?

  S24.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  And how does it feel to be so much worse than us?

• 4:31Andrew Manganelli?

  Can I just say, I'm seriously debating getting the S25 solely because they made a case that's a crock.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  No.

• 4:39Andrew Manganelli?

  And I really might.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  That cannot be an upgrade.

• 4:44Andrew Manganelli?

  Not to derail the conversation.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  I don't even know what we're talking about.

• 4:48Andrew Manganelli?

  So, but, yes.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Somewhere in a Samsung marketing department, you are someone's like dream customer. They pitched this idea and they were like, someone will upgrade from the most recent Samsung phone to the new one just for this case. And that's you.

• 5:01Andrew Manganelli?

  It might be me. But yes, to answer your question, I, I find it, I don't think Alex has ever had an iPhone, but I feel like I might be one of the only people in the office who have like, never at any point in my life been an iPhone user.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 5:14Andrew Manganelli?

  And I think the iPhone's great also, which is even funnier. And I've had the opportunity to do it plenty of times.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  Ellis, have you ever had an Android phone?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, my first two phones were Androids.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Do you remember what they were?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of them was a Samsung Intercept and the other one was a Kyocera Rise.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  I loved those phones.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  These, I always said Kyocera. I don't know if I'm wrong.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Are these what?

• 5:40Speaker 04

  Oh, I always said Kyocera.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  I mean, they're Android phones.

• 5:43Andrew Manganelli?

  Oh, true. Okay, fair.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  That's a good answer.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  You heard it here first. Just having Android does not make a phone smart or good.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  This is a fact.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Andrew Manganelli, everybody.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  2025. Okay, so personally, and you guys know this, I always jump between iOS and Android. I have no loyalty to anyone and it causes me nothing but headaches. All the time when I switch between the two operating systems, I lose access to a ton of apps and it's very annoying. And that is the thing that always like bugs me. Like, it's not so much the blue bubble, green bubble situation. I don't really care about that because I use WhatsApp or Signal or like all the other things. Yeah, I'm so much better.

• 6:21Andrew Manganelli?

  Hey, it's our audience.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  Just use WhatsApp. But. There are so many other apps that become like a part of my just day to day existence that I just lose access to. Like when Ellis first started here, he put me on this app called Copilot. It's a budgeting app on the same thing. You use it too?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  No, Mark has put me on it.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  Really?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I keep, when he put out a video a year or two before I started working here called What Apps Are On My Phone?

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  It was in there.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  Copilot's one of them, yeah. Well, I've been influenced through influence, so.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  I downloaded the Copilot app. It was awesome. It was my budgeting app. And then I switched to the S24 Ultra and just lost all my like budgeting. Like they don't have an Android app. There's also Flighty, like we've spoken about, that is an amazing flight app that tracks all your things. If you're like running between gates and you're about to miss your flight, it will tell you like the quickest reroutes and everything. It's like a very powerful app. There's this app that I use called GentlerStreak, which is for my workouts. And it is also iOS only and Apple Watch only. So when I switch, I just lose all of that.

• 7:21Andrew Manganelli?

  I'm sensing a theme here.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:23Andrew Manganelli?

  You lose everything always when you switch from iOS to Android?

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 7:27Andrew Manganelli?

  It's very rarely the other way around.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Very rare. Yep. But that's what I wanted to get to the bottom of. I want to find out why there are, one, so many iOS only apps. You know, like there's not a lot of Android only apps. Like there's a few, but mostly iOS only. And then, I mean, I guess, like you said, it's my fault for switching in the first place between, uh, between operating systems. But also not really, because I don't know why me switching my phone has to mean that I lose like my budgeting app. You know, like that's crazy to me. So I wanted to talk to a bunch of developers and figure out like why this is the case. Let's get to the bottom of this. Why are there so many iOS only apps and not both cross-platform?

• 8:09Speaker 04

  So without knowing anything that we are about to get into, just off of your like gut feelings and your years of experience, higher than average, you know, consumer experience, why do you think there are so many iOS only apps?

• 8:22Andrew Manganelli?

  You want to go first?

• 8:23Speaker 04

  I have an answer. Yeah, what's your answer?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  I'm not quite a developer, but we do have an app that we've worked on developing for a year.

• 8:31Andrew Manganelli?

  Really?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:32Andrew Manganelli?

  I did not know that.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's called Panels.

• 8:33Andrew Manganelli?

  Oh, cool.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  It's a pretty sweet wallpaper app. So, so the, the main answer that I have found is that when you're developing an iOS app, you develop one version of the app and with minimal effort, it works across hundreds of millions of devices across a variety of screen sizes, iPhones from the most recent to four, five, six, seven year old, easily getting it on an iPad. It might not be the most beautiful iPad app, but it works on iPads. It's just instantly seamlessly compatible. And with Android, this fragmentation world means that you have to do more work to get it to work with the same number of devices. So if I'm just an indie, low budget developer and I want to maximize my ROI, make an iPhone version of the app and that's your easiest way to reach the most people.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  And then, of course, it's the sticky, stickiness factor after that. So if you have people on iPhone that really like it, they'll continue to use it. Yeah.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  Andrew?

• 9:28Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like the simplest answer is if you're just talking about market share, especially in the US, Apple has so much, but you can make an app that fits nicely into every single iPhone and that will fit into like a third of the total Android phones that came out that year. There's just so many Android phones and Android phone sizes and, and everything that it's like, it's so much more work to get them to play nicely with everything.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  Okay. You know, I had similar thoughts at first, but I feel like those are just like gut instincts, you know? You do have some actual experience with like building an app, but I really wanted to like get to the bottom of it and talk to people that live this life and figure out what is going on. So I hit up Christian Selig, friend of the pod. He's a developer that, I don't know, listener, if you guys don't know, he made Apollo for Reddit and when it got shut down like two years ago, I think at this point.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Too long.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, two, two years ago, he also made the Juno app for Apple Vision Pro, which is the, the YouTube player that also got shut down. But he does make Pixel Pals, which is one of my favorite iOS only apps. Then I also reached out to Karn, an Android engineer at Notion. And I wanted to talk to him about the Android side of things. And then John will put me in touch with one of his buddies, this guy called Curtis Herbert, who is a developer that has successful apps on both iOS and Android.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  So we're checking all the boxes here. I wanted to like, yeah, cover our bases. Uh, spoiler alert, it's pretty much exactly what you guys said. But the details are actually really fascinating to think about.

• 11:05Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, like when I said it out loud, in my mind, I could immediately hear all the people who know how to develop saying like, who cares about screen sizes and stuff? I'm sure like it doesn't account for that already because nothing's static. So that's like my guess into that, but I'd like to know why that variation makes it so much harder. Cause I don't know, you know, the time I, I made a website when I was like 14, it was like static and fit in a like 800 by 600 webpage. Yeah. Yeah, like, so now you've got all these different sizes. I'm sure nothing is static anymore. I can probably pretty easily fit into easy in the terms of the developers, impossible for peons like me, but um.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  I also think, and maybe you'll have more info on this, that Apple has maintained like the same scaling from iPhone to iPhone, like year after year after year, where you can imagine the differences between an S25 Ultra and their 2830 by 1440 screen, scaling that perfectly to the Oppo Find N5 with a crazy different aspect ratio and resolution is a lot more challenging.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  We'll find out because we are going to talk to everyone. Actually, Karn had a really good reason why he thinks that Android has a superpower that in the future, people might start leaning that way, which I found really interesting. Uh, how's that for a hook? You're gonna have to stick around and find out.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Is it AI related?

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Yes. Take it away, me.

• 12:33Speaker 05

  Okay, so the whole point of this is to figure out why there are so many iOS-only apps. So I thought we'd break this down into three main sections. The first is why iOS in the first place? Like, why can't you start building on Android and then double back and do iOS? Why do so many developers instinctively turn to iOS first? The second is, okay, let's say you start on iOS, right? You have a successful app. Now, why not double back and build an Android app? Android is like most of the world. You know, you would think that that would be enough of an incentive to then double back and build the Android version. But it's not. And the third point is, why not use tools that let you do both?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  You know what I just thought of an equivalent for this? As a content creator? If you think of different platforms the same way?

• 13:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Like, if you're an iOS-only developer and you make an iPhone app and you're really successful there, that's like being an Instagram influencer and making Instagram-native content and getting successful there. And then the question is, well, why don't you put it on YouTube, too? YouTube's another platform. And it's like, well, I could, but it wouldn't really be YouTube-native. I would have to really focus on the YouTube part of it. But I'm doing so well on Instagram, I might as well double down on it and just become really good with Instagram. And it just feels like a similar conversation in my head, anyway.

• 13:47Speaker 05

  In this analogy, what is TikTok?

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Windows one.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  No, it's actually, it's just like whatever Huawei phone. Like, it's maybe gonna go away, but maybe, like, why keep working on it if it's gonna disappear?

• 14:00Speaker 05

  As an individual developer, there's the aspect of where to focus your time is a really tricky question to ask and a really valuable question because, as one person, you only have so much. And it's valuable to figure out where you want to direct all that time. And for me, I've never found there to be a way where I can kind of have the cake and eat it too and develop for both platforms. So it's kind of a factor of, like, even back when I was developing Apollo, I was kind of of the mind, there was a lot of requests for the Android app, for instance. But I knew every, every, you know, week, every 10 hours I put into this potential Android app would be 10 hours potentially taken away from making the iPhone app that much better. So it's kind of like an opportunity cost in a way. And I think that's how a lot...

• 14:43Speaker 05

  A lot of small teams, like you can't get much smaller than one person, kind of think about it. In that I've got this fine item out of time. Where is my energy best spent?

• 14:53Speaker 04

  Which I guess is fair because you know, if you're like, these are both full-time jobs. Basically, if you're an iOS engineer and an Android engineer, those are two completely different like career paths, you know? So it takes a lot of work. I get why it's difficult to split yourself in two, but that still doesn't answer the question like, why iOS? Like it could work the other way around. You could start on Android, make an Android only thing and then port it over to iPhone, you know? But it always happens on iOS.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Oh, there's another thing we forgot to mention.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Oh, what?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Which is that iPhone users spend more on apps.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  That is true.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  That you might be getting to that.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  Definitely.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. So Karen says.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  You know, it's interesting. I think like, especially here in like North America, you definitely do see like a prevalence of like iOS only apps. And you know, you mentioned some of the reasons for that, you know, it's like money to be made on that side. I think like the average spend for an iOS user is higher than what you'd see for like an Android user. But I think also just like over the last little while, I think iOS devices have become a larger market share in North America. And so people who develop apps probably have their first experience with like an iOS device instead of an Android device. Not necessarily true in the rest of the world, but but definitely here in North America.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  And I actually hadn't thought about that, that like aspect of it, and it pains me to say it, but you know, we are old, us three here in this room. Do you know what happened 18 years ago in 2007?

• 16:19Andrew Manganelli?

  The Crunchwrap Supreme.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Well, the iPhone came out in 2007.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  The iPhone came out in 2007.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  I remember a time before iPhone.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  This is true.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  Not a lot of people do.

• 16:31Andrew Manganelli?

  No, I remember.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  I remember.

• 16:34Andrew Manganelli?

  Just saying, I remember.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  I know.

• 16:35Andrew Manganelli?

  It makes me feel so old.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  I remember when there was a time before smartphones, period. You know, like the flip phone and stuff. My first cool phone was the T-Mobile Sidekick. Did you guys ever have that?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  I remember having friends that had Sidekicks.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  And you never wanted one?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Uh, it was cool to have. I think I probably wanted one.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  I always felt left out not having one.

• 16:57Andrew Manganelli?

  I mostly remember the iPhone coming out because I, well, it was AT&T only. And I wanted the Android version of it. And the first thing that felt super, or you know, I guess it wasn't, I didn't want the Android version of it back then. I wanted the non-iPhone version of it. The LG Voyager.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:12Andrew Manganelli?

  Not really a smartphone, but if you remember, screen, touchscreen on the front. I feel like we were mostly focused on touchscreens.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:19Andrew Manganelli?

  Less of the smart capabilities of, I mean, you'd flip it open like a hot dog and then it would have a keyboard and a screen. I one time tripped off a sidewalk, fell face first, like running to go to the bathroom, opened my phone up, saw the front screen was completely shattered, went, phew, at least I have the inside screen, opened it up and glass just fell out of the inside. So I broke both screens.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  That's impressive.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Mine too, yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  You had a Voyager too?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  I had a Voyager.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  And you broke it?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  I broke it.

• 17:45Andrew Manganelli?

  It was huge.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  It slipped out of my pocket getting out of a cab and I curb stomped it. And it like was open and I landed, my foot just like bent it backwards over the curb in one step. I was like, it's toast.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  That's rough.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Unfortunate, yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 04

  Wow. Well, yeah, for a lot of people, the iPhone was their first like phone experience, you know, like for people younger than us. Which like, it's funny to think about, like when you think of trends and the market and stuff like that, it makes sense that people that, whose first experience was on an iPhone and on an iOS device, when they grow up and learn programming and learn developing and get into this world of technology, they just want to do the thing that they already have. Like you want to build an app for the thing you've been using your whole life. And here in North America, we have a dominant market share of people using iOS devices. It's not necessarily the case globally, but definitely here in North America. Marques, you are someone that has been. Doing tech videos for how long? When was your first video?

• 18:43Speaker 04

  The one that keeps getting recommended to me every six months?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Oh nine.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  Oh nine?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  That's two years after the iPhone.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  What was your first iPhone review?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  So my first iPhone review wasn't till, I want to say the 5S.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  The 5S?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  So iPhones were coming out and I was getting comments about why, why aren't you doing iPhone reviews? And I was like, I'm on Verizon, bro. Like I review what I can get my hands on. And I was doing all these nexuses and all these other phones. And finally, uh, an iPhone was available that I could test. And I, I just got it and that was the beginning.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  That's crazy.

• 19:15Andrew Manganelli?

  This just made me think of that, that like, we keep saying iPhone was AT&T only. Like that was a legitimate hurdle for US consumers back then. And to see so many people now be like, oh, the iPhone, like the iPhone has this crazy market share. People are only buying iPhones. Like back then it was hard to buy an iPhone and it still got to this point. Despite for years it actually being like, I had zero chance of getting one.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:38Andrew Manganelli?

  Cause I was on Verizon.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And exclusivity for a while.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think it became so dominant?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  The iPhone?

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Have you ever used an iPhone? I can give you two, two-part answer. There's how it became dominant and then how it stayed dominant.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  You know what? I'll take the first one.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  How did it become dominant? It became, so the iPhone came out and it had genuinely impressive, innovative tech in it. And the multi-touch, the glass touchscreen, all the stuff that made the iPhone the iPhone. And they kept it really simple and easy to use and very slowly iterated on it. And it became better and better and more and more accessible. And so that was a reason why it gained traction as this new, better thing. Competition caught up. Lots of people have lots of options now, but they have kept their market share by this ecosystem. They've built around the iPhone, this sticky effect where there's so much in the iPhone that it's hard to leave. Nothing comes with you. Arguably, not even arguably, anti-competitive behavior on its part.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  But also culture, like the blue bubble, green bubble thing is more than just Apple now. It's just people who have iPhones. It's a status symbol. It's a premium device. People think of Androids as knockoffs. It's a whole thing in the US. People are watching this in other countries like, are you serious? Like that's all happening independent of what Apple does. So that's, that's why.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Andrew, what's your take?

• 21:01Andrew Manganelli?

  It wasn't the take, I was just thinking like, You know, now it's the green bubble, blue bubble, status symbol aspect. Back then, was it, were people moving? Like, I would love to see the AT&T numbers of pre- because Verizon, at least what I thought, like, that felt like the main carrier in the United States.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  One of the three biggest.

• 21:23Andrew Manganelli?

  One of the three biggest, but AT&T, I would not doubt if they got significant market share of this, like, innovative phone coming out, being exclusive on there. And that exclusivity sometimes means, not as many means building hype. Um, this is my memory as like a, how old was I then? What was it, 2009?

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Google, 2007, the iPhone came out.

• 21:43Andrew Manganelli?

  I was 17.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  You were 17?

• 21:45Andrew Manganelli?

  Old.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. Wow.

• 21:48Andrew Manganelli?

  Sorry.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  You lived a whole life before the iPhone.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. You were about to be able to vote, and then the iPhone came out.

• 21:57Andrew Manganelli?

  And then it took it away.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  But why do you think it didn't take on? Like, why do you think that didn't happen globally?

• 22:06Andrew Manganelli?

  No clue.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Different markets behave and react to the same thing in different ways. So, different price points hit different, in different places. Different cultural influences hit different, like, the, the, the status symbol thing is true in other places, too. And the, and then people will buy an iPhone, and they'll pressure their friends into buying iPhones. But also, like, in places where they buy phones outright versus having a contract with their carrier, and then spending $18 a month on a phone?

• 22:37Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  That incentivizes very different behavior. In, let's just call it a random European country where the iPhone is $500 and has these features, and the Huawei phone is $500 and has these features, I'm just gonna buy the better phone. I don't really care. I don't use iMessage, I just use WhatsApp, so it's just a hardware competition. And Apple can lose that sometimes.

• 22:57Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah. Alice, how old were you in 2007?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  I was in fourth grade.

• 23:03Speaker 05

  Oh my god.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  And, uh, and I had one friend who had an LG chocolate.

• 23:08Speaker 05

  What?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Oh. Cause we were in, uh, we were in fourth grade, so no one had phones.

• 23:13Speaker 05

  When did you get your first phone?

• 23:14Speaker 02

  I got my first phone when I was in eighth grade. My parents really didn't want me to have a cellphone at all. They were like super anti-cellphone. And I saved up my allowance pretty much the entire time I was in middle school. And until I had enough money for my Samsung Intercept and a year's worth of service.

• 23:34Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  That's awesome. And I did it myself, damn it. We came out the mud.

• 23:39Speaker 05

  He was on that grind.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  But yeah, so iPhone was not in my budget.

• 23:44Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Obviously, back then.

• 23:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, that makes sense as an eighth grader.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Christian had something to say about this. He said, like iPhones globally are very much losing to Android. I think like it's, it's, Android has definitely won that war globally. But in North America, like iPhones, I think especially among teenagers have like overwhelming market share, like it's, I think nearing like 90% of, and you have this market where like they dictate a lot of what goes viral and what, what matters, um, and what makes money and, and what gets marketed. And when you have like a 90% market share of this group, and even among adults, it's still very high in North America, iPhone versus Android. So you, you get this, you get these percentages where you're just looking at and you're saying

• 24:30Speaker 05

  like, I have 90% or somewhere in that realm of users on this one platform that makes more money. Is it worth me spending like absolute crap ton of time, uh, building this, this separate component that will have a much smaller, even marketable user base in aggregate. And statistically, they also spend a little less money. So it's, it's a very hard value proposition, I think, for a lot of small teams. And of the friends I've talked to who also do maintain an Android app, it's. Some of them are happy with it. Some of them are like, it's a really tricky market because they, Android users statistically are just from, like, just running the numbers there, they spend less money than iOS users.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  So you have teenagers in North America who have only ever used iPhones, growing up and engaging with apps that are only on iPhones, eventually becoming adults and buying those apps on iPhones at higher rates than their Android counterparts. And even Karin, the Android engineer at Notion, completely agreed with that. He said-

• 25:31Speaker 06

  I think definitely the first part I would agree with, where it's like, if you're just trying to make money, then like make iOS apps. Like, there's more of a user base. There's, like, people are more willing to, to sort of like, give you money for something that you build. And I don't know if necessarily that's true on Android. I think that the expectations are different. Just like the, the, yeah, the, like, the demographics of like, the people who use, like, Android devices have certain expectations as one would when they're making sort of these decisions, right? Like, same reason you'd buy a PlayStation or like an Xbox or whatever the case might be. And so the expectations are different. And so, you know, maybe it's like a little bit harder to get people

• 26:14Speaker 06

  to part ways with their, you know, with their, with their hard-earned money. But that's not necessarily true for all things, right? A good example of this is probably like music apps, like a large streaming service. Like, you know, people pay the, you know, the, whatever, nine, $10 a month for Spotify and, you know, and it's like, you know, that's just, that's just what it is. But I think it's just like, it depends on what the need is. And I think most people's expectations and needs are different on Android.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  Did he compare which user is PlayStation, which user is Xbox?

• 26:45Speaker 05

  He did not.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  That would send our comments off the fucking rails.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I could continue the analogy with Instagram versus YouTube.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  And you'll have to imagine for a second, a complete lie, which is that Instagram has really great CPMs-

• 27:01Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  -for content. So you're making, you're an Instagram-only content creator and you're, there's great CPMs on Instagram. Why would I leave and go make YouTube content? Well, globally, there's a bigger audience on YouTube, but the CPMs are lower. So you can work for that potentially larger audience with overall lower CPMs, or you could just stick to what you're doing really well, double down on Instagram and that's a living.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  So you're saying Instagram is iOS?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  In this, in this example, Instagram with really high CPMs is iOS.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  Okay, got it. And Andrew, you have to say PlayStation or Xbox?

• 27:34Andrew Manganelli?

  Who's who? I mean, the obvious answer is that PlayStation is blue and it would be iOS and

• 27:41Speaker 04

  That's yeah.

• 27:42Andrew Manganelli?

  Microsoft is green and would be Android and I'm an Xbox liker.

• 27:46Speaker 04

  And what's your, uh, your handle on threads and blue skies? People can yell at you?

• 27:51Andrew Manganelli?

  I don't even remember. Pride for the best.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  Nice. Um, yes. Overall, his point was that the expectations on Android are just different. So so far, it seems like something we already knew. iOS users spend more, therefore there's more of an incentive for developers to build for iOS. Nothing groundbreaking there, but that can't be the only reason, right? Like, there has to be another reason. We'll find out after the break.

• 28:26Speaker 00

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• 30:04Speaker 04

  Okay, before the break, we stated the obvious. iOS users spend more money on apps. That's a pretty good incentive for developers to build for iOS. But that can't be the only reason. I wanted to know what the experience was like developing for both platforms. Is building for Apple really that much better? Okay, so both developers agree that you make more money on iOS. Let's be real, you're only making money on Apple's store if you're making money in the first place. Like, most apps don't make money. You know, it's just like, you're doing it because you want to do it and you want to, like, make an app. There are, like, commercial successes, I would say, like, Karn brought up Flappy Bird. That, I would say, is like a viral hit, you know, like, or Wordle. Wordle that got bought by New York Times. We spoke with the creator. That is like a hit.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  You're making money on that somehow because it's in everyone's pocket.

• 30:51Andrew Manganelli?

  Wordle originally, though, was the viral hit.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:54Andrew Manganelli?

  And he bought it for like a million bucks, right? Which is awesome. I'm not saying that's... But like, if you're thinking of like, the absolute number one talked about app at a time, a million dollars feels not that crazy.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  Not that crazy. But, you know, that isn't the case for most apps. Most apps don't make money, like I said. So I kind of wanted to figure out, why do developers keep flocking towards iOS? Like, is there such thing as a developer lock-in? Turns out there is. You know, specifically for Apple, not only do you need to learn Swift, but you also need a Mac to code on, and you have to spend a hundred dollars a year on their developer fee.

• 31:29Speaker 06

  It's not like, it's like a one-time fee. It's like a hundred dollars every year that you have to do it. And, you know, if you're like a student who's like building an app on the side, like, do you want to be paying a hundred dollars a year on, effectively, another subscription for an app that you don't know will get off the ground? And it's an interesting trade off to make, but I think like, you know, Apple is notorious for for sort of streamlining the the sort of experience and and development experiences is no different. Although I would, I would say that like people have talked to about Xcode, which is the the sort of like iOS development, um, like sort of environment, um, like, you know, don't really like it. And I've used it at at like Notion or, you know, like other places, just like it's like passing through or like making small changes. Um, and like

• 32:14Speaker 06

  my experience is I'm like Android Studio is way better.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  So a little background, if you want to build an iOS app, you need to use a program called Xcode. And if you want to build an Android app, you need to use Android Studio. These are IDEs that-

• 32:26Andrew Manganelli?

  Wait, wait, wait. I know what IDE stands for, but just for our listeners who might not know, what does that mean?

• 32:33Speaker 04

  IDE is Integrated Developer Environment. And it's basically a text editor.

• 32:40Andrew Manganelli?

  Nice.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Nailed it. Basically, a text editor that lets you run code in it. So you can't even develop for iOS unless you're running Xcode on their hardware. And then on top of that, you need to pay the hundred dollar fee every year in order to be a developer for Apple. Now, to be fair, Android also has a developer fee, but it's a one time fee of $25. Not really the same. So you would think that all of that friction would be a huge turn off for people developing for iOS. But turns out that Christian said that it actually like works in his favor.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  Apple, 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 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 IDEs you could like to 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 and it's like, there's this like fragmentation that exists that is very intimidating.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  So 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 that 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. But 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,

• 34:35Speaker 04

  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. So 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.

• 34:53Speaker 09

  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. We, 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. So 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.

• 35:38Speaker 09

  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 gonna have all kinds of custom tweaks and settings and all these things they do differently. And that can make life really hard.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, my task manager app, Tic Tic, 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. And 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.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  Oh, my god.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  It just works on the iPhone.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  That's one of those things.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  So that kind of fragmentation makes it a little bit more difficult and intimidating for iOS engineers to dip their toe 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.

• 36:58Speaker 09

  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. And 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 launched with a couple of features alongside iOS.

• 37:42Speaker 09

  And right away on Instagram, we get some Android users like, oh, well, there you go, not caring about Android again. And it's like, it's iOS launch day. Like, of course, we're gonna have an iOS update. What do you expect here? 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 gonna 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.

• 38:24Speaker 09

  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. They're like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. We just assumed like everyone else does it this way.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 39:00Speaker 06

  There's, 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, like a design aesthetic. And, 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. And then they just care a little bit more about the, and this is not to say that like Android engineers don't care about it, but maybe like on average, I think like, uh, folks who use iPhones are a little bit more like, uh, or develop for iPhones are a little bit more, uh, interested in like the aesthetics of, of the, the product. And then I think also iOS and like the design language for, um, just Apple, I guess in general,

• 39:44Speaker 06

  is, is very clean, very like, you know, uh, 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. Um, maybe a good example, this is like material three. Um, is, you know, like they're pushing really hard on like trying to get material three to be like sort of the common way that, that developers think about design. And that I think is a hope at making sure that like the experiences can get to that polish without the kind of investment that, that Android needs right now.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  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 in mind? I have two. Michael Reese's Android.

• 40:28Andrew Manganelli?

  You always got a great one.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Michael Reese is definitely.

• 40:31Andrew Manganelli?

  That's why I love him.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Although he probably.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  He probably uses iPhone.

• 40:36Andrew Manganelli?

  He might use iPhone.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Totally, but his videos are Android.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:39Andrew Manganelli?

  His videos are Android.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Uh, Whistling.

• 40:40Andrew Manganelli?

  Pure chaos.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Um, who's an iPhone?

• 40:45Andrew Manganelli?

  Dave2D is an iPhone.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  That's a good one.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, clean, very aesthetic, that's fair.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Maybe unbox therapy, very, very, the, the consistent aesthetic is, is important.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:57Andrew Manganelli?

  I would argue, if you wanted to do that, unbox would be Android because it's like a, just do it live, like.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Not as pure.

• 41:04Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, pure aesthetically, yeah.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, totally, style-wise.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  What about like Zach from J-Rig Everything?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  That feels, hmm, that feels more Android because of what he's doing in the videos. He's taking things apart, putting it back together.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  I also had him as an Android developer in my head.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  What about Ollier?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  That would be an iPhone.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yes, that would be an iPhone.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Right, that's just like, the, it feels right.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:31Andrew Manganelli?

  Those are like.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  The vibes.

• 41:32Andrew Manganelli?

  Who I picture.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  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. You know, straight lines, minimal, elegant, simple, aluminum.

• 41:51Andrew Manganelli?

  Can I just throw something out there?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  You may.

• 41:53Andrew Manganelli?

  I think the main reason I do not use an iPhone is because of the aesthetics.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Really?

• 41:58Andrew Manganelli?

  I, and up until recently, they let you do it, but I like a very blank home screen. You could not do that on iPhone. I thought it was super annoying. I don't know why everyone likes a cool background and then forty, like, app icons on their homepage.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:12Andrew Manganelli?

  That seemed terrible to me.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  What do you have on your, on your home screen right now?

• 42:16Andrew Manganelli?

  It's just my dock, a clock, and the like, search bar.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  You could kind of do that on iOS.

• 42:21Andrew Manganelli?

  You can now, that's like, only in the most recent.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:24Andrew Manganelli?

  You can kind of do it.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Close, yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 42:27Andrew Manganelli?

  So, yeah.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  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. So if you have customization, you can change it to your own aesthetic, dub.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  And not only the aesthetics of Apple drive people in, unless you're Andrew, but.

• 42:46Speaker 04

  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's doing right now. So that might not always be the case because that is a different aesthetic that Google has been like consistent with.

• 43:08Speaker 09

  I 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.

• 43:35Andrew Manganelli?

  Do they even call it Material U anymore?

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Material U.

• 43:38Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  Material U.

• 43:39Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  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. Curtis 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. Google will just like change it up and be like, that thing you were just doing for two years? Nevermind, we're on this now. And with material, 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 like consistent and that is going to start like the ball rolling down the hill and keep the momentum moving, moving forward. So it'll change this year. Calling it because you said that.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  Dude, if that happens, oh my God, I hope not.

• 44:26Andrew Manganelli?

  I like Material U.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. I do too.

• 44:28Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  I'm going to blame you if that happens. I'm going to bring this up.

• 44:33Andrew Manganelli?

  Hiroshi's laughing, he's like.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  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, you know? It can't be that big of a problem.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  So also with fragmentation, one of the things that they mentioned, specifically Christian, Christian was saying-

• 45:18Speaker 05

  Even if they nail the developer tooling ecosystem, which I don't think they have, neither is Apple to be fair, but like you also get this additional aspect once you're done where, holy crap, like the user base you're deploying to is not like a holistic, 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. So if there's a cool new Dynamic Island API 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 jagged and fragmented, which is a word that's been abused over the years, but like it's that new feature you're building, the phones that get Android

• 46:01Speaker 05

  20 or whatever are on now, might not get that in aggregate and majority for, you know, three, four years. So that feature you're building now that you're super hyped about, like what, 5% of your users on Pixel phones might get it? Like that's not super exciting to develop for?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  That's crazy.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  I'm sure if you found the Android stat, it would be like, how many Android phones right now are on 50?

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, not a lot.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Not that many?

• 46:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  S25s?

• 46:45Speaker 01

  OnePlus 13s, Pixels, that might be it.

• 46:48Speaker 04

  Pixels, maybe.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  So yeah, you get that instant turnaround of like hundreds of millions of people having the newest feature.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  Versus on Android, you don't really get that.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Pixel users will eat it up though. Like, I got the latest version, I'm on top of it and I love that.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, but then Samsung users have to wait like three years until they're.

• 47:21Andrew Manganelli?

  I just worked up on 14.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so yeah, it's gonna be true.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  So it seems to me that developer lock-in is pretty real, but not for the technical reasons that I originally thought. 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.

• 47:56Speaker 01

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• 48:41Speaker 01

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• 49:43Speaker 04

  Okay, welcome back. So I'm calling this section the "por qué 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 like initially choose to build for iOS. You recently released an app.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  What was it called again?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  It's called Panels.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  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?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Uh, for 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.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 50:37Andrew Manganelli?

  It would have been way easier to do one.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Way easier to just do one. Facts. Yes.

• 50:43Andrew Manganelli?

  We probably would have made some money off it if we only did one.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 04

  There are tools like React Native from Facebook, or I guess Meta now, Kotlin multi-platform from JetBrains, and Flutter from Google. These 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, theories as to why this is the case.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  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 their website and 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?

• 51:37Speaker 05

  For one thing, like with with a web app, you're kind of targeting like 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.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  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 of 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. And he went back and hired an Android developer.

• 52:29Speaker 09

  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, 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 long time 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. So we are Kotlin, we are Material Design, there was no cross-platform here.

• 53:13Speaker 09

  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 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, but it's, it was a challenge. It took well over a year to really get there.

• 53:50Speaker 04

  And even that took a year to build with like some guy that he hired who knew exactly what he was doing. Can relate.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:08Andrew Manganelli?

  I think that's way more important than people give credit to.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  The developer experience.

• 54:13Andrew Manganelli?

  The develop, 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 Marques says to people aspiring to be YouTubers forever. 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 going to be a garbage app and then just stressful all of the time.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  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? 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

• 55:42Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  interacts with the technology. Like, you know what I always think about? And no shade to Vimeo, but Vimeo still exists.

• 55:48Andrew Manganelli?

  I'll throw the shade at Vimeo.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  I've followed Vimeo over the years.

• 55:53Andrew Manganelli?

  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.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  That's literally.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  That's how it started.

• 56:02Speaker 04

  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?

• 56:16Andrew Manganelli?

  Vimeo?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  YouTube. YouTube would be.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  I guess both, because it was.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  In short form or long form?

• 56:23Speaker 04

  Long form.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, iOS.

• 56:25Speaker 04

  Okay, interesting.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  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 reel 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?

• 56:58Andrew Manganelli?

  Nothing.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Today?

• 56:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, right now Vimeo has an announcement and you're like, hmm, I should do that.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  It would be something where I specifically don't want to put it on YouTube. It would have to be really specific.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Because that's kind of how I, I'm thinking like iOS developers feel.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  You know?

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe Vimeo doesn't have as many upsides as, as the comparison, but we keep saying fragmentation, but this being like both an upside and an Achilles heel, it's really choice. Like on Android, you have choice. You can get a $1,300 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 and different resolutions, different OS numbers. And on the other side of the fence, there's

• 58:00Speaker 01

  the iPhone, which has, what, four models, five models right now?

• 58:04Speaker 04

  Something like that.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  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.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  But I Not fun.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  Let's not do

• 58:57Speaker 01

  The ROI is not as high.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 59:01Andrew Manganelli?

  I feel like doing that is, have you ever played prestige mode in Call of Duty?

• 59:04Speaker 04

  No.

• 59:05Andrew Manganelli?

  Where you're 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. That's kind of what it sounds like. You're like, I built my app.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Now I'm gonna do it again.

• 59:20Andrew Manganelli?

  When I played Call of Duty, it was 55.

• 59:24Andrew Manganelli?

  I got to 55, I have every gun unlocked.

• 59:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:26Andrew Manganelli?

  I'm going to start over, just so the next time I'm at 55, there's like two stars next to it.

• 59:31Speaker 04

  Oh my God, that's crazy.

• 59:32Andrew Manganelli?

  There's no, the benefit that is you have two apps, I guess, but like

• 59:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:36Andrew Manganelli?

  Those first few levels are brutal.

• 59:37Speaker 04

  So 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 some, someone that, 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

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  invested in an Android engineer to like come and do this thing.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Just because you popped off on Instagram doesn't mean it's going to work on YouTube.

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  Facts.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it always comes back to like, why play with fire? Like, if you play it safe and you 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.

• 1:00:40Andrew Manganelli?

  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.

• 1:00:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Andrew Manganelli?

  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?

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  The employees, you had to hire me and Alex.

• 1:01:07Andrew Manganelli?

  We literally like, had to hire more people to do it. It's, it's, it was successful.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Andrew Manganelli?

  And the, 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.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Wait, this is, people actually watch this? We're on camera?

• 1:01:28Andrew Manganelli?

  I should start brushing my hair.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  This was just for funsies.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  Wait, you guys get paid?

• 1:01:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  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. So you have to invest in both.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  And being everywhere.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  I think a lot of the really cool Android-only apps are the ones that...

• 1:02:08Andrew Manganelli?

  Name one.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Well, I, I can't name them.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  But I would, I would imagine that, that they're the ones that let you do things that Apple doesn't, that you have access to. Like, like all of the like battery optimizer.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  Nova Launcher, stuff like that.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  I don't know what that is, but is that like, oh, that's the salmon cannon at the national parks?

• 1:02:31Speaker 04

  The launcher?

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Nova Launcher? Get it? Get it?

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Those are the worst puns.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Get it? But you know what I mean? Like, like the battery optimizer sort of ones are like, the ones that give you access to the sound card to put like really advanced EQs across like the entire headphone.

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  I was gonna say headphone jack.

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  The audio spectrum.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know what I mean? Like.

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  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 yesterday.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  What is Nova Launcher?

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  Nova Launcher is, yeah, damn, you sound like such an iPhone user.

• 1:03:10Andrew Manganelli?

  It's, it lets you like change the themes and like how things work.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  You can like completely change your home screen, your home screen layout, how things behave.

• 1:03:18Andrew Manganelli?

  App drawers and like all sorts of different things.

• 1:03:20Speaker 04

  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 codebase. Like, there's this thing, React Native, it's open source, made by, made by Facebook, or I guess Meta now. There'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

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  to Apple, or two apps, one for Apple, one for Android.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  I imagine that this works about as well as Google Translate.

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:04:22Andrew Manganelli?

  Is this not what panels is in?

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  I think panels is Kotlin multi-platform.

• 1:04:27Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  I think.

• 1:04:28Speaker 04

  And then edited after the translation.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:04:43Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay.

• 1:04:43Speaker 04

  But we, yeah, that's the difference. So Curtis had a really interesting analogy that kind of blew my mind.

• 1:04:49Speaker 09

  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 hitting limits of WordPress and what it can do. And 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

• 1:05:32Speaker 09

  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.

• 1:05:55Speaker 04

  But I found it really interesting because for me, that kind of solves the problem. Like 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

• 1:06:18Speaker 05

  you got 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. Like, like Pixel Pals, for instance, where you mentioned like 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 like, I don't even know if React Native has the proper mappings on day one to like access all the status bar and dynamic island stuff. Whereas like, Apple obviously does. So I can like hit the ground running, go really quick, build a really cool native experience around that. And the same is basically true with Android.

• 1:07:00Speaker 06

  The question of like, why, why not just use something like React Native or Flutter is like an important question. And I think what it boils down to is kind of like your, your, your, your needs, like what, what is your use case? So for like, uh, you know, a simple application, you might, you might, you might want to do something like React Native or Flutter. Because you're just doing like, what is effectively like, reading and writing like small, making small edits. You can think of like a reservation app, for example, for your like, uh, 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, cross-platform like, like ways. That is a real sort of like consequence of using these like, uh, these types of technologies, these cross-platform technologies.

• 1:07:45Speaker 06

  Is that they don't, they sort of abstract away some of the, uh, the, the sort of low-level APIs that you have. And, and there's, because there's a layer on top of it, you, you lose out on some of the performance. So even 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, to, to turn native? And what is the, the right thing to keep in like, uh, we use like web views in the background, but, um, like other apps might do like Flutter or whatever, but, or like React Native. So like you might wanna 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.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:09:01Speaker 05

  So I wanted to build that into Apollo. And it turns out you had to throw out like the entire navigation stack and rebuild it from scratch to implement it going 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. Um, 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, eh, I'm gonna tweak that animation curve by point one seconds. Um, a native app would just

• 1:09:44Speaker 05

  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 parity with something that's potentially always moving. Um, and it, and it definitely can create like this uncanny valley. Like, I tried really hard to get it. I would still get like some like, point one percent of users who would be like, I can tell you're, you're doing something here and I don't like it.

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  Which sounds like a nightmare.

• 1:10:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  I could not imagine doing that. So all this led me to the conclusion that, at least here in North America,

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  Android is cooked, right? That's, that's pretty much what, 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 Karn brought up a really interesting point that Android actually has a superpower in this AI boom that we're going through right now.

• 1:10:40Speaker 06

  One of the things that I think is going to be like super exciting in the, in the going near future, and I think where Android has a bit of a superpower is in like the integratedness of, or like the connectedness of all the apps on your device. If you think about it, for a lot of people, um, you know, as a developer, there's a privilege of having someone walk around with your 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 opportunity is and where I think like Android is a little

• 1:11:24Speaker 06

  bit ahead is, is how much apps can talk to each other. You can like get to a state where you could potentially replace like Google Assistant or like Bixby or whatever you're running on, on your, on your device. And, and like, will there ever be a Siri replacement? Or will we have to wait for Siri to catch up to like whatever the, the most like up to date or like latest like voice assistant is? And so iOS is a little bit slower on these things just because they own it end to end. Whereas like Google has a little bit more flexibility and like they just expose the APIs and let developers run with it.

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  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, perplexity assistant. If that's the case for Apple, you have to wait for them to integrate it into Siri. And if the Apple intelligence rollout is any indication.

• 1:12:19Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, that's a great point.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  Doesn't look like it's going to be a, a huge, you know, needle jumping movement anytime soon.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not going to change rapidly.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  I keep coming back to this analogy of uploading content to different social media platforms. And it'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, but 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.

• 1:13:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  So that's not going to change anytime soon. But yeah, the way it starts is just, it's up to the developer.

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  Yep. I feel like there will continue to be iOS only apps dominating the stores.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  But 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 AIs 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 gotta 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,

• 1:13:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  Oh, you're screwing me here.

• 1:14:06Speaker 05

  That, I mean, the, the, the political answer would be, it would wholly depend on the app. I think, whoo, if you're just like a one person team, if you can call it that, and you're looking to develop something, I would say like iOS, if it's a very North American market that you're targeting, I would say like iOS is definitely like a solid bet. Like you're gonna end up probably taking twice as long. It's going to 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 and, and a more fruitful majority of the market. And at least let you see if this idea has legs. And then maybe if it does, like explore other options at that point.

• 1:14:50Speaker 05

  Like maybe, maybe you have an idea that you think would absolutely crush on Android and, and don't just, you know. Throwaway Android just because you have some preconceived notion like look into it for sure. But I I think for the get go, it's it's a hard argument to make to not just explore your idea on iOS and see where that goes. But again, very biased.

• 1:15:10Speaker 06

  Building mobile apps is is an experience of its own, I would say. I think, you know, I started building out or these games and then didn't like web dev. But there was something very tangible of building something that showed up on your phone. And, you know, like I mentioned, that you have the privilege of carrying with you in other places. When 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 them play around with it.

• 1:15:55Speaker 06

  But for me, I think like being able to just like, you know, have an experience like Google, the Google Podcasts 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 backend for a lot of the stuff that I 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.

• 1:16:36Speaker 06

  Um, you can do that and just like have it run on your phone and carry your phone all the time with you and runs in the background and that's like super fun. 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? Like you're scrolling your 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, own way.

• 1:17:09Speaker 09

  I, I'm gonna throw you a wild card here. I, 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. Like, that shouldn't be exclusive to Mac. Um, and the Android platform has gotten a lot better from a development standpoint than it was in the early days compared to iOS. Um, so, start with iOS, but I would say give Android a serious look. Uh, it doesn't have to be choosing a side necessarily.

• 1:17:53Speaker 09

  Um, you'll have to pick one to dedicate your resources to at first, all. Um, if that's your situation, pick Android easier, or pick iOS, sorry, easier to iterate. But when you get big enough, don't ignore Android. Like, test the waters, see if you can do something there. Um, and realize, like, just like iOS, it's gonna take some time to get traction. It's gonna take some time to get users that respect your app. It's not gonna be an overnight success. Um, just because you have a successful iOS app, it's gonna take years on Android, just like iOS probably did for you. But I, I would try more to convince people to give it a shot than to pick a side.

• 1:18:32Speaker 04

  And I can agree, because I will be back on Android eventually at some point, I'm sure.

• 1:18:36Andrew Manganelli?

  By the time this episode goes out.

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

  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. I 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.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  I'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, Marquez wants to leave you with a pun.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  The grass is greener.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  On the Android side. Just saying.

• 1:19:44Andrew Manganelli?

  I was gonna go the opposite route.

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  As an Android user?

• 1:19:46Andrew Manganelli?

  No. I, 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. So like the great Ron Swanson once said, never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.

• 1:20:11Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:20:12Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  That's, that's hard. Yeah.

• 1:20:15Andrew Manganelli?

  But as an Android user, that really screws me over. So maybe half-ass two things.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  Way from us, produced by Adam Alena and Ellis Rovin. We're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music was created by Vane Sill.

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