The Differences Between iPhone And Android Developers Part 1
Last night, I attended my first Google Android Developer Meetup. The month before, I attended my first iPhone Developer Meetup. With this tiny sample, I am more than qualified to start issuing unproven generalities.
The iPhone meetups have been going on for several months and have a large number of developers. The Android meetup is only two months old and had about 2 dozen developers. The iPhone crowd was mainly people looking to make money on the iPhone, either for themselves or for their company. The Android meetup was primarily attended by people programming Android as a hobby and out of curiosity. But the biggest difference of all: just about everyone at the iPhone meetup owned an iPhone or iTouch while only three people at the Android meetup owned a Google phone.
One of the more interesting statements for why the developers had not bought a Google phone yet was that the Android programming test tools included an excellent simulator while the iPhone simulator almost required a developer to buy a real iPhone to test their applications. But the other reason that the Google phones were not purchased yet is that developers have already bought the iPhone, in addition to the phone that they already owned, and just did not see any big reason to buy another phone.
