Costs involved developing Android App vs iPhone apps

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I realise that this is very much a "how-long-is-a-piece-of-string" type question, but I'd really like to get some idea of the costs and time involved in developing an app for the Android market compared to the iPhone.

My understanding is that it doesn't cost developers to submit apps to the Android Marketplace (as opposed to the iPhone Developer’s Program which costs $99 a year). So there's a saving there.

But in terms of development costs, would you suggest that hiring a developer to create an Android app would be cheaper because the market's smaller? Would it make no difference at all? Would it be harder to find a developer to code for Android?

Basically, any thoughts anyone has on this would be really appreciated.

Cheers,

Why don't you try and find out? Ask some (android)developers what app x would cost and ask some (iphone)developers the same

for most applications it should be cheaper to hire an Android programmer because you develop in standard Java and this is the most widely used language in computer science education. Eclipse is also a standard development environment many young programmers are familiar with. Even I was able to code my first Android application in a matter of minutes.
Objective-C on the other side is a nieche language. Of course, every good progammer can learn that language in a couple of hours or at least days but there are definitly more experienced Java programmers out there and they can reuse code (snippets). Java code is so ubiqitous you can find for a lot of problems coded and tested solutions. So two reasons: there are much more Java programmers out there and they can develop faster. Specific Android experience is not needed as long as you don't want to program kernel extensions or things like that.
But I guess the Apple-market is still more profitable because Apple users are trained to spend money. So even as it may cost more to develop it also brings in more revenue. I hope the sheer amount of Android handsets out there will outweigh this advantage soon.

Humm .. i think this is a tricky question.

While it will definitely be cheaper to develop an application for android, the question you might want to ask (depending on what you want to do) is what is the ROI of an Android application versus and IOS application.

And even then, depending on the type of application & the demographic your app will be targeting (not to mention usability, design, general app quality) the response will likely vary quite a bit too.

But globally yeah, it's cheaper and less a hassle to make an android app i'd say. ..then again, i have an allergy to apples, and this is an android forum after all

Originally Posted by robert_tlse

Humm .. i think this is a tricky question.

While it will definitely be cheaper to develop an application for android, the question you might want to ask (depending on what you want to do) is what is the ROI of an Android application versus and IOS application.

And even then, depending on the type of application & the demographic your app will be targeting (not to mention usability, design, general app quality) the response will likely vary quite a bit too.

But globally yeah, it's cheaper and less a hassle to make an android app i'd say. ..then again, i have an allergy to apples, and this is an android forum after all

Hehe, I agree on that Robert.

ten chars!!!

You can also spend many months developing an iPhone app, only to have it rejected by Apple for no good reason. That's quite expensive.

It is, however, unescapable that there are a lot of iOS users who buy a lot of apps from the App Store, so the potential ROI is higher. There's also only a few platforms to develop for (although this is becoming increasingly less the case).

Would like for Android to have more focus though; it's getting there!

(The diminutive term "app" does irk me slightly - Apple have popularised it in relation to phones when they convinced everyone that the iPhone was the first phone to support third-party software. Guess it's stuck now though.)

then why are Android apps more expensive??

Android apps aren't more expensive. They have by far the largest proportion of free apps on any mobile platform and even those that do cost are comparatively cheap.