To make apps for Android you can take a 15 years old PC from the dumpster and a 5 years old smartphone that your cousin threw away and you’re done. No other payment required.
To make apps for iOS you need to have a supported Mac and you need to have a supported iPhone. The OS upgrade treadmill means you need to buy a new one of both every 5-6 year (or used every 2-3 years). Finally, you need to pay a yearly $100 development subscription forever. (When you stop paying, your apps are unpublished)
Also: on Android you share the source and anyone can compile it even a decade after release. On iOS compiling old source is much more difficult as you probably need to change or fix to the updated apis
Yeah, subscription cost has led to apps that would be free on Android being paid on Apple or opting out of being available all together. Not just on iOS but MacOS too, and opting for being available outside the Mac store.
Plus, you can’t sideload on Apple
Android studio in a 15 year old pc sounds PAINFUL.
Android studio on a modern computer is painful
Also on Android, Google decides what models of phones are able to use the Play Store. So unless you get into a third party store, or expect your users to side-load, that old smartphone might not be so useful.
The old smartphone is only used for testing, you can literally use whatever you want (with increasing limitations), if you really want you can use even an HTC dream with Android 2
Android studio is a very heavy peace of garbage! you need modern hardware to get somewhere.
Can use an ancient version of eclipse if you really want.
The point btw is that there’s isn’t a marketing department that artificially decides that your computer is too old to run a specific application and you need to buy a new one
I thought Android Studio (or more specifically, the Android SDK) is required for making Android apps?
You aren’t limited to that, android studio is just a customized specialized version of JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, if someone has a lot of time and patience, can use another ide
I’ve made some apps in my life and one time I made something for myself and simply skipped apple because it isn’t worth the headache.
For starters you’ll need an OSX VM, then pay 100 eur a year for a dev account, and then manage those god awful provisioning profiles.
Finally, side loading wasn’t possible back then and their store is a black box and follows strange arbitrary American centric rules.
Edit: Also I should add that in order to get my hands on an OSX iso ten years ago I had to find someone with an apple computer to be able to purchase the OS with my account. And apparently this is a legal gray zone.
These days it’s a bit easier because you can use a cloud build provider and just stuff the provisioning profiles in there, for example if you use Unity3d.
On apple/iOS - The app store, you have to pay a annual fee to be a registered developer.
On android you have f-droid, fully open source, no fees.
You can side-load an app from anywhere so you don’t even need storefronts like f-droid, you can just have the APKs as releases right with wherever you’re hosting the source code!
