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I think a lot of the really cool Android only apps are the ones that one well I I
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can't name them but I would I would imagine that that they're the ones that let you do things that Apple doesn't let you have access
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to what is up people of the internet welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts I'm
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Marquez I'm Andrew and I am Adam and Adam is sitting where I'm normally sitting and I I don't make the rules but
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I think that means you're hosting now it's bonus episode time I stole your seat I took it the drum that was an accident it worked Ellis is still on the
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boards thank God uh 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 more particular so Marquez
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you are famously a dual wielder of phones you have Android you have iPhone in both Pockets at any given time it's
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true what are those two phones right now uh currently it's the iPhone 16 Pro in I guess it's just black space black maybe
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and then the Samsung Galaxy s25 Ultra in I I think they call it silver blue that's a weird name something like that there's no way they call it silver blue right I'm going to look that up while we continue yeah okay so in your experience
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having two phones for the past what 10 years yeah are there any apps that you wish were on both devices or that you avoid using just because it's only on iOS only oh constantly yeah I mean one
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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
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thing that I'll check is is it iPhone only like it happens a lot so if it is do you download it do you move forward
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or 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
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on the Android phone and I want to be able to use it on both yeah so yeah it's a it's kind of a deal breaker for me if it is iPhone only Andrew first of all it
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is called silver blue there's also Pink gold and white silver as different colors wow unbelievable all one word
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turns out if you just like combine colors you get new colors who I no one um You' never had an iPhone I've
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literally never been an iPhone and you just recently got an iPad Mini I did get an iPad Mini did you install any apps on the iPad Mini that you've been hearing everyone talk about that were iOS only
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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 of for a bigger screen and so you're using your
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iPad Mini as like a conduit for Google services yeah like uh I really like it to like walk around the office and have
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Google tasks on which is terrible on the iPad and like stuff like stuff like that nice uh what phone are you using right
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now s24 and how does it feel to be so much worse than us um can I just say I'm seriously debating
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getting the s25 solely because they made a case that's a Croc no and I really might TR that
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cannot upgrade ah derail the conversation I don't even know what we're talking so but yes somewhere in a Samsung marketing department you are someone's like dream
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customer they pitched this idea and they were like someone will upgrade from the most recent Samsung phone to the new one
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just for this case and that's you it might be me but yes to answer your question I I find it I I don't think
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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
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point in my life been an iPhone user interesting and I think the iPhone's great also which is even funnier and
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I've had the opportunity to do it plenty of times huh Ellis have you ever had an Android phone yeah my first two phones
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were Androids do you remember what they were yeah one of them was a Samsung Intercept
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and the other one was a kiasera rise I loved those phones these always said kyera I don't know if I'm wrong are these what oh I always said kones I mean they're Android phones oh true okay
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fair that's a good answer you heard it here first just having Android does not make a phone smart or good this is a
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fact Andrew manganella everybody 2025 okay so personally and you guys know this I always jump between iOS and
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Android I have no loyalty to anyone and it causes me nothing but headaches all the time when I switch between the two
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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
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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
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yeah I'm so much bettery it's our audience just use WhatsApp but there are so many other apps that become like a part of my just day-to-day existence that just lose access to like when Ellis
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first started here he put me on this app called co-pilot it's a budgeting app on the same thing you use it too no Mark
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has put me on it really yeah keep when he put out a video a year or two before I started working here called what apps
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are on my phone yeah it was in there cop one of them yeah well I've been influenced through influence
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so I downloaded the co-pilot app it was awesome it was my budgeting app and then I switched to the s24 ultra and just
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lost all my like budgeting like they don't have an Android app there's also flight like we've spoken about that is
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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
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quickest reroutes and everything it's like a very powerful app um there's this app that I use called gentler streak
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which is for my workouts and it is also iOS only and Apple watch only MH so when
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I switch I just lose all of that I'm sensing a theme here yes MH you lose everything always when you switch from iOS to Android correct it's very rarely the other way around very rare yep but
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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
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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
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said it's my fault for switching in the first place between uh between operating systems but also not really because I
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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
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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
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this why are there so many iOS only apps and not both crossplatform so without knowing anything that we are about to get into just off of your like gut feelings and your years of experience
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higher than average you know consumer experience why do you think there are so many iOS only apps you go first want go
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I have an answer yeah what's your answer um I'm not quite a developer but we do have an app that we've worked on
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developing for a year really yeah oh I did not know that yeah yeah it's called panels Co it's a pretty sweet wallpaper
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app so so the the main answer that I 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
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across a variety of screen sizes iPhones from the most recent to four five six seveny old easily getting it on an iPad it might not be the most beautiful iPad app but it works on iPads it's just in
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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 a an indie lowbudget
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developer and I want to maximize my Roi make an iPhone version of the app and that's your easiest way to reach the
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most people and then of course it's the sticky stickiness Factor after that so if you have people on iPhone that really
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like it they'll continue to use it yeah Andrew yeah I mean I feel like the simplest answer is if you're just talking about market share especially in
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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
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many Android phones and Android phone sizes and and everything that it's like it's so much more work to get them to
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play nicely with everything okay you know I had similar thoughts at first but I feel like those are just like gut
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instincts you know you do have some actual experience with like building an app uh but I really wanted to like get
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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 seelig
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front 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
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it got shut down like two years ago I think at this point too long yeah two two years ago he also made the Juno app
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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 um then I also reached out to K an Android
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engineer at notion and I wanted to talk to him about the Android side of things and then Jon put me in touch with one of his buddies this guy called Curtis Herbert who is a developer that has
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successful apps on both IOS and Android okay so we're checking all the boxes here I wanted to like cover our bases uh
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spoiler alert it's pretty much exactly what you guys said but the details are actually really
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fascinating to think about yeah like when I said it out loud in my mind I could immediately hear all the people
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who know how to develop saying like who cares about screen sizes and stuff I'm sure like it doesn't account for that
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already because nothing's static so that's like my guess into that but I'd like to know why that variation makes it
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so much harder cuz 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 we page yeah like so now
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you've got all these different sizes I'm sure nothing is static anymore and can probably pretty easily fit into easy in
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the terms of the developers impossible for peons like me but um 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
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after year after year where you can imagine the differences between an s25 Ultra and their 2830 by 1440 screen
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scaling that perfectly to the Oppo Find N5 with a crazy different aspect ratio and resolution is a lot more challenging we'll find out because we are going to talk to everyone uh actually K had a
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really good reason why he thinks that Android has a superpower that in the future people might start leaning that
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way which I found really interesting uh how's that for a hook you're going to have to stick around and find out is it AI related
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did yes taken away me 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
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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
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many developers instinctively turn to iOS first the second is okay let's say you start on iOS right you have a
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successful app now why not double back and build an Android app Android is like most of the world you know you would
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think that that would be enough of an incentive to then double back and build the Android version but it's not and the
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third point is why not use tools that let you do both you know I just thought of an equivalent for this as a content
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creator if you think of different platforms the same way yeah like if you're an iOS only developer and you
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make an iPhone app and you're really successful there that's like being an Instagram influencer and making
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Instagram native content and getting success successful there and then the question is well why don't you put it on YouTube too YouTube's another platform
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and it's like well I could but it wouldn't really be YouTube Native I would have to really focus on the
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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
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similar conversation that I had anyway in this analogy what is Tik Tok Windows window no it's actually it's
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just like whatever Huawei phone like it's maybe going to go away but maybe like why I keep working on if it's going
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to disappear as an individual developer there's the aspect of where to focus your time is a really tricky question
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ask and a really valuable question because as one person you only have so much and it's valuable to figure out
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where you want to direct all that time um and for me I've never found there to be a way where I can kind of have the
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cake and eat it to and develop for both platforms so it's kind of a factor of um like even back when I was developing
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Apollo I was kind of of the mind uh there was a lot of requests for the Android app for instance but I knew
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every every you know week every 10 hours I put into this um potential Android app would be 10 hours potentially taken away
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from making the iPhone app that much better um so it's kind of like an opportunity cost in a way um and I think
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that's how a lot of um small teams like you can't get much smaller than one person um kind of think about it um in
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that I've got this fine item out of time where is my energy best spent 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
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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
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two but that still doesn't answer the question like why iOS like it could work the other way around you could start on
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Android make an Android only thing and then Port it over to iPhone you know but it always happens on iOS oh there's
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another thing we forgot to mention oh what which is that iPhone users spend more on apps yeah yeah that is true that
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you might be getting to that definitely okay yeah so Ken says you know it's interesting I think like especially here
00:14:02
in like North America you definitely do see like a prevalence of like iOS only apps and you know you mentioned some of
00:14:09
the reasons for that you know it's like more money to be made on on that side I think like the average spend for an iOS
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user is is higher than what you'd see for like an Android User but I think also just like over the last little
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while I think iOS devices have become a larger market share in in North America and so people who develop apps probably have their first experience with like an
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like an iOS device instead of an Android device not necessarily true in the rest of the world but but definitely here in
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North America and I actually hadn't thought about that that like aspect of it and it pains me to say it but you
00:14:43
know we are old us three here in this room do you know what happened 18 years ago in 2007 the
00:14:52
supr uh well the iPhone came out in 2007 the iPhone came out in 2007 yeah I remember a time before iPhone this is
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true not a lot of people do no I remember yeah yeah I remember that just saying I remember makes me feel soing
00:15:10
my I remember when there was a time before smartphones period you know like the flip phone and stuff my first cool
00:15:15
phone was the T-Mobile Sidekick did you guys ever have that I remember having friends that had Sidekicks and you never
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wanted one uh it was cool to have I think I probably wanted one yeah I always felt left out not having one I
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mostly remember the iPhone coming out because I well it was AT&T only and I wanted the Android version of it and the
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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
00:15:38
the non- iPhone version of it the LG Voyager hell yeah oh yeah not really a smartphone but if you remember screen
00:15:45
touch screen on the front I feel like we're mostly focused on touch screens less of the smart capabilities of and
00:15:50
then you'd flip it open like a hot dog and then it would have a keyboard in screen at one time tripped off a
00:15:57
sidewalk fell face first just like running to go to the bathroom opened my phone up saw the front screen was completely shattered went pH at least I have the inside screen opened it up and glass just fell out of the inside of it
00:16:09
so I broke both screens that's impressive mine too yeah you had a voyager too I had a voyager and you
00:16:14
broke it I broke it this was huge it slipped out of my pocket getting out of a cab and I curb stomped it oh and it
00:16:21
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 that's
00:16:28
rough unfortunate yeah wow well yeah for a lot of people the iPhone was their first like phone experience you know
00:16:34
like for people younger than us which like it's funny to think about like when you think of Trends and the market and
00:16:40
stuff like that it makes sense that people that whose first experience was on an iPhone and on an iOS device when
00:16:46
they grow up and learn programming and learn developing and get into this world of technology they just want to do the
00:16:53
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
00:16:59
a dominant market share of people using iOS devices um it's not necessarily the case globally but definitely here in North America Marquez you are someone
00:17:09
that has been doing Tech videos for how long when was your first video the one that keeps getting recommended to me
00:17:14
every 6 months 09 09 yeah that's two years after the iPhone yeah what was your first iPhone review so my first
00:17:21
iPhone review wasn't until I want to say the 5S the 5S so iPhones were coming out
00:17:26
and I was getting comments about why how why aren't you doing iPhone reviews and I was like I'm on Verizon bro like I I
00:17:32
review what I can get my hands on and I was doing all these nexuses and all these other phones and finally uh an
00:17:39
iPhone was available that I could test and I I just got it and that was a beginning that's crazy this just made me
00:17:45
think of that that like we keep saying iPhone was AT&T only like that was a legitimate hurdle for us consumers back
00:17:53
then and to see so many people now be like oh the iPhone like the iPhone has this crazy market share people are only
00:18:00
buying iPhones like back then it was hard to buy an iPhone and it still got to this point despite for years it
00:18:06
actually being like I had zero chance of getting one because I was on ver exclusivity for a while yeah yeah why do you think it became so dominant the
00:18:13
iPhone yeah 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 you know
00:18:24
what I'll take the first one how did it become dominant it became so the iPhone came out and it it had had genuinely
00:18:30
impressive Innovative Tech in it and the multitouch the glass touch screen all the stuff that made the iPhone the
00:18:36
iPhone and they kept it really simple and easy to use and very slowly iterated on it and it became better and better
00:18:42
and more and more accessible and so that was a reason why it gained traction as this new better thing mhm competition
00:18:49
caught up lots of people have lots of options now but they have kept their market share by this ecosystem they've
00:18:56
built around the iPhone this sticky effect where there's so much in the iPhone that it's hard to leave nothing
00:19:02
comes with you m arguably not even arguably anti-competitive Behavior On's part um but also culture like the blue bubble green bubble thing is more than
00:19:13
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
00:19:25
countries like are you serious like that it's all happening independent of what Apple does so that's that's why Andrew
00:19:30
what's your take it wasn't a take it was just thinking like you know now it's the green bubble blue bubble status symbol
00:19:37
aspect back then was it were people moving like I would love to see the AT&T numbers of pre because
00:19:44
Verizon at least what I thought like that felt like the main carrier in the United States one of the three biggest one of the three biggest but AT&T I would not doubt if they got significant
00:19:56
market share of this like Innovative phone coming out being exclusive on there and that exclusivity sometimes
00:20:03
means not as many means building hype I'm this is my memory as like a how old was I then what was it 2009 you said 2007 the iPhone came out I I was 17 you
00:20:14
were 17 old yeah wow sorry you lived a whole life before the iPhone yeah you were about to be able to
00:20:25
vote and then the iPhone came out and then it took it away [Laughter] um but why do you think it didn't take
00:20:32
on like why do you think that didn't happen globally no clue different markets behave and react to the same thing in different ways so different price points hit different in different places uh
00:20:46
different cultural uh influences hit different like the the the status symbol thing is
00:20:53
true in other places too MH um and the and then people will buy an iPhone and they pressure their phones into buying
00:20:58
iphon but also like in places where they buy phones outright versus having a contract
00:21:04
with their carrier and then spending a month on a phone that incentivizes very different behavior in let's just call it
00:21:11
a random European country where the iPhone is $500 and has these features and the Huawei phone is $500 and has
00:21:17
these features I'm just going to buy the better phone I don't really care I don't use iMessage I just use WhatsApp so it's
00:21:23
just a hardware competition and apple can lose that sometimes yeah Ellis how old were you in
00:21:30
2007 I was in fourth grade oh my God and uh and I had one friend who had an LG Chocolate cuz we were in uh we were in fourth grade so no one had phones when
00:21:43
did you get your first phone I got my first phone when I was in eighth grade my parents really didn't want me to have
00:21:49
a cell phone 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
00:22:01
Samsung Intercept and a Year's worth of service awesome and I did it myself damn
00:22:06
it we came out the mud um was on that grind um but yeah so iPhone was not in my budget nice okay obviously back then yeah that makes sense as an eighth grader yeah yeah so Christian had
00:22:20
something to say about this he said like iPhones globally are very much losing to
00:22:26
Android I think like it's it's Android has definitely won that war globally but in North America like iPhones I think
00:22:33
especially among teenagers have like overwhelming market share like it's I think nearing like 90% of and you have
00:22:40
this Market where like they dictate a lot of what goes viral and what what matters um and what makes money and and
00:22:47
what gets marketed um 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 um so you get this you get these
00:22:59
percentages where you're just looking at and you're saying like I have 90% or somewhere in that realm of users on this
00:23:05
one platform that makes more money um is it worth me spending like a absolute crap ton of time uh building this this separate component that will have a much
00:23:16
smaller even marketable user base in aggregate um and statistically they also spend a little less money um so it's it's a very hard value proposition I think for a lot of small teams um and of
00:23:28
the friends I've talked to who also do maintain an Android app it's some of them are are happy with it
00:23:34
some of them are like it's a really tricky Market because they Android users statistically are just from like just running the numbers they're they spend less money than iOS users so you have
00:23:45
teenagers in North America who have only ever used iPhones growing up and engaging with apps that are only on
00:23:51
iPhones eventually becoming adults and buying those apps on iPhones at higher rates than their Android counterparts uh
00:23:58
and even K the Android engineer at notion completely agreed with that he said I think definitely the first part I
00:24:03
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
00:24:09
a user base there's like people are more willing to to sort of like give you money for something that you build um and I don't know if necessarily if that's true on on Android I think like
00:24:22
the expectations are different just like the the yeah the like the demographics of
00:24:28
like the people who use like Android devices have certain expectations as as one would would when they're making sort
00:24:34
of these decisions right like same reason you'd buy a PlayStation or like a like an Xbox or whatever the case might be um and so this the expectations are
00:24:41
different and so you know maybe it's like a little bit harder to get people to part ways with their you know with
00:24:46
their with their hard earned money but that's not necessarily true for all things right a good example of this is
00:24:51
probably like music apps like a large streaming service like you know people pay the you know the whatever $9 $10 a
00:24:59
month for for Spotify and you know and it's like you know that's just that's just what it is um but I think
00:25:07
it's like it depends on what the need is and I think most people's expectations and needs are different on on Android
00:25:12
did he compare which users PlayStation which users Xbox that would send our comments off the I could continue I could continue the analogy with the Instagram versus YouTube and
00:25:24
you'll have to imagine for a second a complete lie which is that Instagram has really great cpms okay for Content so
00:25:32
you're making you're an Instagram only um content creator and you're there's great cpms on Instagram why would I
00:25:37
leave and go make YouTube content well globally there's a bigger audience on YouTube but the cpms are lower so you
00:25:44
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
00:25:50
and that's a living so you're saying Instagram is IOS in this in this example Instagram with really high CPM is IOS okay got it yeah and Andrew you have to
00:26:02
say Playstation or Xbox who's who who's who I mean the obvious answer is that PlayStation is blue and it would be iOS and Microsoft is green and would be
00:26:13
Android and I'm an Xbox ler and what's your uh your handle on threads and blue sky so people can yell at you uh I don't even remember probably for the best nice
00:26:24
um yeah so overall his point was that the expectations on are just different so so far it seems like something we
00:26:30
already knew iOS users spend more therefore there's more of an incentive for developers to build for iOS nothing
00:26:37
groundbreaking there but that can't be the only reason right like there has to be another reason we'll find out after
00:26:43
the [Music] break okay before the break we stay the obvious iOS users spend more money on apps that's a pretty good incentive for
00:27:02
developers to build for iOS but that can't be the only reason I wanted to know what the experience was like
00:27:07
developing for both platforms is building for Apple really that much better okay so both developers agree
00:27:14
that you make more money on iOS let's be real you're only making money on Apple Store if you're making money in the
00:27:20
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
00:27:26
you want to like make an app uh there are like commercial successes I would say like K brought up uh Flappy Bird
00:27:33
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
00:27:38
the the Creator that is like a hit you're making money on that somehow because it's in everyone's pocket Wordle
00:27:44
originally that was the viral hit and he bought it for like a million bucks right
00:27:49
which is awesome I'm not saying that but like if you're thinking of like the absolute number one talked about app at
00:27:55
a time a million dollars feels not that crazy 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
00:28:08
like is there such thing as a developer lockin turns out there is you know specifically for Apple not only do you
00:28:14
need to learn Swift but you also need a Mac to code on and you have to spend $100 a year on their developer fee it's
00:28:21
not like it's like a onetime fee it's like $100 every year that you have to do it and you know if you're like a student
00:28:28
student who's like building an app on the side like do you want to be paying $100 a year on on effectively another
00:28:33
subscription um for an app that you don't know will will get off the ground and it's it's a interesting trade-off to
00:28:39
make but I think like you know apple is notorious for for sort of streamlining the the sort of experience and and
00:28:47
development experience is 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
00:28:53
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 as like passing through or like making
00:29:03
small changes um and like my experience is I'm like Android Studio is way better so little background if you want to
00:29:10
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
00:29:15
Android Studio these are IDE that wait wait wait I know what IDE stands for ju but just for our listeners who might not know M what does that mean IDE is
00:29:26
integrated developer environment and it's basically a text editor nailed it basically a text editor that lets you run code in it so you
00:29:37
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 $100
00:29:43
fee every year in order to be a developer for Apple now to be fair Android also has a developer fee but
00:29:49
it's a onetime fee of $25 not really the same so you would think that all of that friction would be a huge turnoff for people to developing for iOS but turns out that Christian
00:30:01
said that it actually like Works in his favor 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 it to a few devices that's very
00:30:12
controlled they have this very controlled ecosystem um that allows them to have a very refined developer experience you download xcode you type
00:30:19
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
00:30:26
tried there was like two different Android um idees you could like Cho like text editors you could choose from and
00:30:32
then from then like the you there's like 17 million devices you could choose from to like emulate on and the emulator was
00:30:37
really slow and it and and it's like there's this like fragmentation that exists that um is very intimidating like
00:30:44
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
00:30:50
everything like that but like once you get over that hurdle and you're just like in that ecosystem coding for the
00:30:56
iPhone is like so so easy I found it interesting because I hadn't really thought of it in that way I guess I'm
00:31:02
like wired to instantly recoil from like anything that provides that much guidance uh but it turns out that when
00:31:08
you're building a complicated program having the like guiding hand of Craig federi is actually kind of
00:31:13
helpful uh but Christian brought up another point which is fragmentation and you mentioned this at the beginning too
00:31:20
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
00:31:26
has like what 20 devices or something like that like in total so I called up Curtis Herbert who's a developer that
00:31:32
has an app called slopes which is pretty successful and works on both IOS and Android so just as an example of one of
00:31:39
the biggest headaches that he's run into while maintaining apps for both Android and iOS is the Samsung battery saving
00:31:45
mode the screen size is not the problem this has actually been a huge point for slopes on Android is the device
00:31:50
differences and the problem often isn't the UI it's everything else uh so a great example is battery savers we there was actually a website out there I forget the URL but it was listing all
00:32:04
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
00:32:17
slopes you're using the GPS you're clearly signaling to the system hey we're doing something that the user
00:32:24
cares about here Samsung winning care it would go in and just keep quitting slopes throughout the day and we'd have
00:32:31
to have all kinds of help articles for like here's how to go in for like this Hardware device and kill the battery
00:32:37
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
00:32:50
like iOS we can just it works the same on every iPhone IOS works the same Android is not that story depending on the manufacturer you come from they're going to have all kinds of custom tweaks
00:33:01
and settings and all these things they do differently and that can make life really hard yeah my task manager app
00:33:08
tick tick it it has a function that it can remind you of a 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
00:33:19
into the settings and disable the battery saver function of this app and blah blah and it kind of gives you vague
00:33:26
instructions to hopefully be generic for every Android phone but you have to go in and do that to guarantee you get the notification for the feature to work oh
00:33:32
my God it just works on the iPhone yeah that's one of those things interesting yeah so that kind of fragmentation makes
00:33:38
it a little bit more difficult and intimidating for iOS Engineers to dip their tone to the Android side of things
00:33:43
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
00:33:49
not be a top priority and it's so that's actually one thing that's also been a challenge on the Android side of the
00:33:54
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
00:34:08
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
00:34:20
like a good example was uh last September you know we always have when iOS comes out in September we always
00:34:27
have support for the the new features and all that kind of stuff and we launch with a couple features in alongside iOS
00:34:34
and right away on Instagram we get some Android users like oh well there you go not caring about Android again it's like
00:34:41
it's iOS launch day like of course we're going to have an iOS update what do you expect here um and we've had users write
00:34:48
in and be like oh it's really frustrating you don't care about Android it's like we have four years of
00:34:54
constantly shipping updates and constantly trying to right by the platform and yeah iOS is going to be a
00:35:00
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
00:35:09
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
00:35:15
would be unfair um so like yeah there's an unfair Advantage there but we try really hard to launch features at the
00:35:21
same time when we can to not hold back Android like Android is constantly getting stuff and we're trying so hard
00:35:27
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 too
00:35:35
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
00:35:42
sorry we just assumed like everyone else does it this way but real quick going back to the point about Android fragmentation that doesn't just apply to
00:35:49
the hardware or the software of the phones it also applies to the design there's there's also this other aspect
00:35:54
of it which is that I think Android is like very frag M mented both as like an operating system like how many devices
00:36:00
it supports but also as like like a design aesthetic and and maybe this is just like the kinds of folks who build
00:36:08
apps for iOS are naturally just more sort of like uh interested in the design yeah and they just care a little bit more about the and this is not to say that like adid Engineers don't care about it but maybe like on average I
00:36:20
think like uh folks who use iPhones are a little bit more like or develop for iPhones are a little bit more uh
00:36:26
interested in like the Aesthetics of of the the product and then I think also iOS and like the design language for um
00:36:35
just Apple I guess in general is is very clean very like you know uh polished and
00:36:41
I think they have a lot of stuff that makes it easier for people to plug in play and I think edroid is trying to get
00:36:46
to like Google is trying to get to that stage um maybe a good example this is like material 3 um is you know like
00:36:53
they're pushing really hard on like trying to get material 3 to be like sort of the common way that that developers
00:36:59
think about design and that I think is a hope at making sure that like the experiences can get to that polish
00:37:05
without the kind of investment that that Android needs right now so like in your head if you had to pick YouTubers one of
00:37:11
them was yeah one of them represents an iOS Developer and one of them represents an Android developer do you have any in
00:37:18
mine I have two M uses Android a good one great Michael Reeves is definitely that's why I love him so although he probably he probably uses iPhone might
00:37:29
totally but his videos are Android his videos are Android whist Android um who is an iPhone God who Dave 2D is an iPhone oh sure yeah that's a good one I
00:37:41
can see that clean very aesthetic that's fair yeah maybe unbox therapy very very
00:37:46
the the consistent aesthetic is is important mhm yeah I would argue if you wanted to do that unbox would be Android
00:37:52
because it's like a just do it live like not p aesthetically yeah yeah but yeah totally style-wise what about like Zack from Jer RG everything that feels H it
00:38:06
feels more Android because of what he's doing in the videos he's taking things apart putting them back together I also
00:38:13
had him as an Android developer in my head totally what about oer that would be an iPhone y yes that
00:38:19
would be an iPhone right that's just like the It Feels Right yeah those are like who I picture yeah The Vibes that's
00:38:25
who I picture M so let's be real Aesthetics are important and in this age of Apple that we're living in there's an
00:38:31
entire generation of Engineers and product designers who were raised in the apple way of doing things and the
00:38:37
overall Apple aesthetic you know straight lines minimal elegant simple aluminum can I just throw something out there you may I think the main reason I do not use an iPhone is because of the
00:38:49
Aesthetics really I and up until recently they let you do it but I like a very blank home screen you could not do
00:38:56
that on iPhone I thought it was super annoying I don't know why Everyone likes a cool background and then 40 like app
00:39:03
icons on their homepage yeah that seemed terrible to me what do you have on your on your home screen right now it's just my dock a clock and the like search bar
00:39:12
you could kind of do that on you can now that's like only in the most recent update you can kind of do it yeah
00:39:19
interesting so so it's like it's kind of a part Aesthetics part customization because they could lock you into an
00:39:25
aesthetic but if you don't like the aesthetic it's not great so if you have customization you can change it to your
00:39:30
own aesthetic dub and not only the Aesthetics of Apple Drive people in unless you're Andrew but also if you're an iOS Developer you can just like also
00:39:40
make more money on that platform so it's kind of like these two driving forces that are leading everyone to just like
00:39:45
start developing on iOS um 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
00:39:56
because that is a different aesthetic that Google has been like consistent with I don't know I would push back on
00:40:02
keeping up design wise with apple like I think they're doing their own thing um and I definitely have respect for material I feel like once we got to like the last three years of material design
00:40:14
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
00:40:19
language but I definitely feel like material is headed in the right direction and I I like it now I like
00:40:26
what we can do do with it do they even call it material U anymore material U matal 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
00:40:38
anything in that way like we have a new thing but that's kind of the point that's the good thing ctis was saying that like one of the things that people
00:40:44
who develop for iOS really value about Apple is the consistency and the stability of like their design is their
00:40:50
design for years M Google will just like change it up and be like that thing you were just doing for two years never mind
00:40:56
we're on just now and with material material U right Android 12 by the way 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
00:41:08
hill and keep the momentum moving moving forward so like it'll change this year calling it because you said that
00:41:15
dude if that happens oh my God I hope not I like material you yeah I do too yeah I'm going to blame you if that happens I'm going to bring this up her roi's watching this like yeah I got him
00:41:29
material U is one of my favorite design Aesthetics and I miss my pixel every day
00:41:34
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
00:41:44
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
00:41:51
this episode is about why there are so many iOS exclusive apps so what is it about fragmentation that causes iOS
00:41:57
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
00:42:03
can't be that big of a problem so also with fragmentation one of the things that they mentioned specifically Christian Christian was saying even if
00:42:10
they nailed the developer tooling ecosystem which I which I don't think they have and neither is Apple to be fair but like you also get this this
00:42:16
additional aspect once you're done where holy crap like the the user base you're
00:42:22
deploying to is not like a holistic um they're all on the same page like iOS within 6 months of like the new iOS version coming out you can be damn sure the vast majority of people are on it um
00:42:33
so if there's a cool new Dynamic Island API um or a new like notifications API or something that you want to play with
00:42:38
probably everyone's going to get it and that's cool thing to build an experience around Android like it's much more um
00:42:44
Jagged and fragmented which is a you know a word that's been abused over the years but like it's that new feature
00:42:50
you're building the phones that get Android 20 or whatever on now might not get that in in Aggregate and majority
00:42:57
for you know 3 four years um so that feature you're building now that you're super hyped about like what 5% of your
00:43:03
users on Pixel phones might get it like that's not super exciting to develop for on top of that like when you develop for
00:43:08
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
00:43:14
will hit hundreds of millions of people the next week uh this sat in front of me
00:43:20
right now on Apple's website is 76% of all iPhones introduced in the past four years are on the latest version iOS 18 that's crazy if I'm sure if you found the Android stat it would be like how
00:43:31
many Android phones right now are on 15 yeah not a lot not that many yeah S2s OnePlus 13s pixels that might be it maybe so
00:43:42
yeah you get that instant turnaround of like hundreds of millions of people having the newest feuture and that was
00:43:47
one of Christian's like biggest points was that you get this like positive feedback loop of like I just worked on
00:43:52
this thing for a month the day it comes out on everyone's phones now my app like supports and he's getting all this
00:43:58
feedback on social media and it's like a big community of people celebrating like this new thing that he just worked so hard on yeah versus on Android you don't
00:44:04
really get that yeah pixel pixel users will eat it up though like I got the latest version I'm on top of it and I
00:44:10
love that yeah but then Samsung users have to wait like three years until there I just up on 14 yeah so yeah it's
00:44:16
going to be true yeah so it seems to me that developer lock in is pretty real but not for the technical reasons that I
00:44:22
originally thought and it has a lot more to do with how you see yourself and what kind of developer you fire to be after
00:44:28
the break things will get a little bit more technical but don't worry it'll still basically be an Apple versus
00:44:33
Android slugfest I know that's what you're here [Music] for okay welcome back so I'm calling this section the do section or why not
00:44:53
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
00:45:01
why 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
00:45:08
little technical so I think we have a pretty decent idea of why people like initially choose to build for iOS you
00:45:15
relas recently released an app mhm what was it called again it's called panels panels that's what it was
00:45:21
panels why did you choose to hit them both at the same time instead of doing one and then double back and do other uh
00:45:27
for us it was specifically because we know our audiences split pretty evenly so we know lots of people use iPhone who
00:45:34
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
00:45:40
there so we just wanted to do both okay it would have been way easier to only do one way easier to just do one facts yes
00:45:48
we probably would have made some money off it too if we only did one yeah there are tools like react native from
00:45:54
Facebook or I guess meta now cotland multi platform from jet brains and flutter from Google these are all open-
00:46:00
Source things that will allow you to do just that to write code once and then export for Apple iOS and even web kind
00:46:07
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
00:46:13
conversation I have three three two three three theories as to why this is the case okay all right one your app takes off but it still demands a lot of your time and money Apollo for Reddit
00:46:25
falls under this category I asked CHR when we were talking you know Reddit is just like a website and Apollo was like
00:46:32
taking the information from that 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
00:46:38
have had the app and a website why not both for one thing like with with a web app you're kind of targeting like um the lowest common denominator like it's a very not necessarily in a negative way
00:46:50
but it's a very non-tailored experience and a big thing with Apollo that people were excited about was like this isn't
00:46:55
this is not a crossplatform appap it's an app that feels like an iOS like app like if you're familiar at all with iOS
00:47:01
and you like the technology um this is going to feel tailored toward your device and that resonated with a lot of people whereas I think just being like
00:47:08
this is like every other web app you navigate to um is less of like a oh I feel special using this but then I spoke
00:47:14
with Curtis who did exactly what I wish more developers would do which is he launched an IOS app called slopes it was
00:47:21
pretty successful he was able to like make it his main thing and then a couple years later he was like you know there's
00:47:26
this whole other Market of Android developers or Android developers Android users that I should try to hit and he
00:47:32
went back and hired an Android developer I mean it was a challenge finding a great Android engineer uh that could
00:47:38
kind of take the lead on that um 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
00:47:49
money out there uh out there so finding a good engineer uh that could be a senior engineer hands-off and could kind of take the lead on cloning the IOS app um so context um I'm
00:48:03
a longtime Apple user love the platform we did it on iOS native and I wanted to make sure that when we did Android we showed similar respect to those users so we are cotlin we are material design
00:48:15
there was no crossplatform here um and there was a schw of uh contractors out there that could help us launch a react
00:48:22
app or something like that but uh battery life is kind of important when you're skiing you need to make sure the
00:48:27
app actually runs all day um 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 an engineer
00:48:39
that kind of checked all those boxes was a challenge um and then cloning the IOS
00:48:46
app was a lot of work so we had to rewrite everything but it's it was a challenge uh it took well over a year um
00:48:54
to really get there and even that took a year to build M with like some guy that he hired who knew exactly what he was
00:49:00
doing can relate the second category is you are successful enough that you think you can build your own Android app but it's just not as fulfilling or worse it's just
00:49:11
more difficult than you expected I think that's way more important than people give credit to the developer experience
00:49:18
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
00:49:24
because he had a good time building that app like think about what Marquez says to people aspiring to be YouTubers for
00:49:31
ever he's always said this is like if you have fun making the videos and genuinely enjoying making them better
00:49:37
the viewers are something that might come in but like you never have to worry about your view count if you just enjoy
00:49:43
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
00:49:49
probably going to be a garbage app and then just stressful all of the time yeah that's fair and it's it's like what are
00:49:54
your goals with the app are your goals to reach most number of people and have the largest audience possible then it
00:50:00
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
00:50:06
refined environment maybe then it's just one platform yeah like it really does depend on how also you kind of see
00:50:12
yourself I feel like earlier when we were talking about which YouTubers kind of represent which that's like a very
00:50:17
particular aesthetic that I think people like align themselves with so if you see yourself as one kind of person you're
00:50:24
going to be drawn towards that device and that operating system system and that aesthetic and then that's who you're going to be developing for you
00:50:30
know um but it also works in Reverse oddly enough because K made an Android app and then it was pretty successful
00:50:37
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
00:50:42
passion for it because it's like it's not how he yeah interacts with the technology like you know what I always think about and no shade to Vimeo but Vimeo still exists I'll throw the shade
00:50:54
at Vimeo I've followed vime over the years video only still exists because when you had
00:51:01
to put licensed music on like a cool highlight video YouTube took it off so you threw it on Vimeo instead that's
00:51:06
literally it started yeah I have that here so it's like I feel like YouTube for online video streaming is the dominant winner you know like that is in my eyes I I don't even know would that
00:51:19
be Android or iOS Vimeo YouTube YouTube would be I guess both cuz it short form or
00:51:27
long form long form it's iOS okay interesting yeah so I just feel like it's been such
00:51:34
the dominant winner but like whenever I find a random I don't know documentary maker or something and I go to see their
00:51:40
real it's always on Vimeo or like a random brand thing is always on Vimeo I never like click in and see their like
00:51:47
YouTube channel unless they're YouTubers trying to be YouTubers so like I feel like that professional real aesthetic or
00:51:54
YouTuber kind of like I create videos to creative aesthetic are like the two things that drive people to those two
00:52:00
platforms what would make you want to upload to Vimeo nothing today yeah right now Vimeo has an announcement and you're like hm I should do that it it would be something where I specifically don't
00:52:12
want to put it on YouTube it would have to be really specific cuz that's kind of how I I'm thinking like iOS developers
00:52:18
feel sure yeah yeah you know yeah I don't know maybe Vimeo doesn't have as many upsides as as the comparison but
00:52:27
we keep saying fragmentation but uh this being like both an upside and an Achilles heel it's really Choice like on
00:52:35
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
00:52:46
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
00:52:52
that's the upside the downside is those phones and those companies are all managed very differently and are all updating at different rates and are all scaled differently in different resolutions different OS numbers and on
00:53:04
the other side of the fence there's the iPhone which has what four models five models right now something like that and
00:53:11
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 heal of Android but it is kind of why we
00:53:23
love it so let's say You're Building an Android app unless you start the project
00:53:29
with the idea in mind that you're going to go both to Android and to iOS doing a a complete rebuild of that app in a
00:53:35
different language can be like an insane amount of work I kind of thought of it like because they they kept telling me
00:53:41
this and I didn't really like click it together and I was like ah I don't see it like I don't know why it would be that much more work and then I thought
00:53:47
of like okay what if I wanted to reproduce this podcast for Vimeo and for YouTube mhm like that would be an insane
00:53:55
amount of work we'd have to re-record everything mhm twice which we've done before but I that's not fun let's not do
00:54:02
the ROI is not as high yeah exactly um I feel like doing that is have you ever played prestige mode in Call of Duty no where you just like you get all the way to your highest level you unlock everything and
00:54:14
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
00:54:20
all the guns again and everything God that's kind of what it sounds like you're like I built my app at the when I
00:54:26
played Call of Duty was 55 I got to 55 I have every gun unlocked I'm going to start over just so the next time I'm at 55 there's like two stars next to it oh my God that's crazy
00:54:37
there's no the the benefit then is you have two apps I guess but like those first few levels are brutal so yeah
00:54:43
turns out if you don't start out building your app with the intention of going to both platforms doing an entire
00:54:48
rebuild is pretty expensive and really difficult even a company as big as an ocean had to really think about whether
00:54:54
or not they wanted to invest the time and resources to rebuilding their app from scratch basically in order to make
00:55:00
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
00:55:12
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 true invested in an Android engineer to like
00:55:19
come and do this thing just cuz you popped off on Instagram doesn't mean it's going to work on YouTube facts you know yeah so it always
00:55:26
comes back to like why play with fire like if you play it safe and you just stay with the platform you're already on
00:55:31
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
00:55:43
I don't need to go over there you could think of waveform the audio podcast when
00:55:48
it launched where we started from the beginning we made an audio podcast we had a very small amount of things we had
00:55:55
to hit because it was only our voices and then we had to relaunch the video podcast at some point which now you know
00:56:02
it might not even work as a video podcast there's so many more variables onto like what is on the screen what our
00:56:08
set is what our lighting is how many people the employees you had to hire me like we literally like had to hire more
00:56:14
people to do it it's it's it was successful and the the audio stuff is still doing great but like the audio was
00:56:20
very simple they get it at 4:00 a.m. still every day the video we had to change launch times cuz so many more V
00:56:27
yeah things have changed a lot wait this is people actually watch this we're on camera I should start brushing my hair I
00:56:34
I thought this was just for funsies wait you guys get paid so the third category of you have
00:56:42
an IOS app and you're like you know trying to dabble in the Android side of things if your app is successful you
00:56:48
will need Android Engineers which is something that K said and I found that super compelling cuz if you think about
00:56:54
like the giant apps f Facebook Instagram notion they all have both especially because the goals are different because they need to reach as many people as possible and if you're leaving one out you're messing it up so you have to
00:57:05
invest in both yeah and being everywhere I think a lot of the really cool Android
00:57:11
only apps are the ones that one well I I can't name them but I would I would imagine that that they're the ones that let you do
00:57:25
things that apple doesn't let you have access to like like all of the like Battery Optimizer launcher stuff like
00:57:31
that I don't know what that is but oh that's the salmon cannon at the national parks a launcher Nova Launcher oh my god
00:57:39
get it the worst puns get it but you know what I mean like like the Battery Optimizer sort of ones or like the ones that give you access to the sound card to put like really Advanced eqs across
00:57:50
like the entire headphone yeah I was about to say headphone jack um the audio yeah but you know what I mean like yeah those kind of like apps that they become popular because they can only be on
00:58:03
Android it's less so that they are good popular apps not that they're not because Nova Launcher is like my
00:58:09
favorite thing I just downloaded it yesterday what is NOA launcher Nova Launcher is damn you sound like such an
00:58:15
iPhone user it's it lets you like change the themes and like how things work you
00:58:20
can like completely change your home screen your home screen layout how things behave and like all sorts of different things the settings and the
00:58:26
like real deep phone things are the same that depends manufacturer to manufacturer but like the aesthetic of
00:58:31
it you can completely customize so one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to all these developers in this episode
00:58:37
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
00:58:48
to like rewrite the whole code base like there's this thing react native it's open source made by made by Facebook or
00:58:55
I guess meta now there's flutter which is by Google and the whole benefit the whole point of this is you can write
00:59:02
your code in like JavaScript just like a regular language and then you hit like basically export and it pops out to
00:59:09
Apple or two apps one for apple one for Android I imagine that this works about as well as Google
00:59:16
translate damn you know what I mean like it'll get the gist it'll get probably the function of the sentence you're trying to say but it probably won't be grammatically perfect is this not what
00:59:27
panels is in I think panels is cotlin multiplatform okay I think and then edited after the translation yeah so the translation it's like if you just hit translate and then just go this is it
00:59:40
then you'll have a not that great up but we've translated and then developed both independently after the translation so
00:59:46
we didn't build it from scratch for both okay but we yeah that's the difference so Curtis had a really interesting
00:59:52
analogy that kind of blew my mind the way I look at it is those tools are great in some situations um the best way
01:00:00
I usually explain it to non-developers but have like maybe some sense of at least the internet is like WordPress is
01:00:07
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 back end with all these things
01:00:18
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 hating limits of Wordpress and what it can do and react
01:00:30
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
01:00:36
apps out there that it just doesn't make sense for and especially as you get more and more deeply connected to the
01:00:42
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
01:00:48
hacking around react almost as much work as it's going to be to just write it native at that point um yeah so it's
01:00:56
it's a good technology it has its use cases but like every technology it has its trade-offs but I found it really
01:01:01
interesting because for me that kind of solves the problem like unless you have a very specific use case why wouldn't
01:01:08
you use both of these right like you can just publish to everyone instead of like needing to hire two completely different
01:01:14
teams of people and do all this thing um but apparently that does come with some
01:01:20
drawbacks so Christian for example was saying that you get a total win and that um you have an experience on both platforms which something existing on Android or something existing on iOS when it wouldn't otherwise is infinitely
01:01:31
better than nothing uh but the experience on each is not as great as it could have been if you developed it like wholly natively like um like pixel Pals for instance where you mentioned like
01:01:42
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
01:01:48
all that in um whereas like I don't even know if react native has the proper mappings on day one to like access all
01:01:54
the status Baron Dynamic Island stuff um whereas like apple obviously does so I can like hit the ground running go
01:01:59
really quick uh build a really cool native experience around that and the same is basically true with Android the
01:02:05
question of like why why not just use something like react native or flutter is like an important question and I
01:02:10
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 a you
01:02:18
know a simple application you might you might you might want to do something like react native or or flutter because
01:02:25
you're just doing like what is effectively like reading and and writing like small making small edits uh you can
01:02:30
think of like a reservation app for example for your like uh like local barber or whatever and these apps lend
01:02:37
themselves well to being like things that you can sort of deploy in these like CL crossplatform like like ways
01:02:44
that is a real sort of like consequence of using these like uh these types of Technologies these crossplatform
01:02:49
Technologies is that they don't they sort of abstract away some of the uh the the sort of lowlevel apis
01:02:57
that you have um and and there's because there's a layer on top of it you you lose out on some of the performance so
01:03:05
even at like notion for example one of the things that we do is we make these trade-offs between like what is the
01:03:11
right thing to to to turn native and what is the the right thing to keep and like U we use like web views in the
01:03:17
background but um like other apps might do like flutter or whatever but or like react native so like you might want to
01:03:24
like depending on what your use case are and like whether you need the performance um those are the kinds of
01:03:30
like trade-offs you'd make for for going native versus going to one of these crossplatform things I still wasn't
01:03:36
personally super convinced after this I was like okay sure whatever that seems like a fair trade for me to have like my
01:03:41
app everywhere and then Christian told me a crazy story which was when he was building Apollo he was trying to redo a
01:03:50
certain like navigation movement like you know on all phones now basically when you swipe from left to right it like takes you back like the main feed
01:03:56
mhm and he was doing that accidentally and he was like okay well to me the solve is pretty simple you just swipe
01:04:01
from right to left like you do it in the opposite direction jump back into the thing you were just doing so I wanted to build that into Apollo and it turns out
01:04:08
you had to throw like the entire navigation stack and rebuild it from scratch to implement it go in the other direction um because you anyway so but
01:04:15
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
01:04:21
like the animation curve and trying to mimic that um because there would be like such little details of like where
01:04:26
the page underneath would slowly slide into frame at a different rate than the one on top would move and like you have
01:04:31
to have a super close attention to detail to mimic these things and if the person building like the react native Library 3 years ago doesn't necessarily
01:04:38
have that attention to detail because they just want something that's crossplatform or Worse iOS 18.1 comes
01:04:44
along and Apple's like I'm going to tweak that animation curve by 0.1 seconds um a native app would just adopt
01:04:50
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
01:04:56
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
01:05:01
to keep parody with something that's potentially always moving um and it and it definitely can create like this
01:05:07
uncanny valley like I tried really hard to get it and I would still get like some like 0.1% of users who would be
01:05:12
like I can tell you're you're doing something here and I don't like it which sounds like a nightmare yeah I can not
01:05:17
imagine doing that so all this led me to the conclusion that at least here in North America Android is cooked right
01:05:24
that's that's pretty much what what we're getting at people use iPhone from an early age those people grow up to
01:05:29
eventually be developers that will then develop for iPhone or purchase on the iPhone app store and then using these
01:05:35
crossplatform tools is basically frowned upon for most use cases but K brought up a really interesting point that Android
01:05:42
actually has a superpower in this AI boom that we're going through right now one of the things that I think is going to be like super exciting in in the
01:05:48
going near future and I think where Android has a bit of a superpower is in like the integrated of or like the
01:05:55
connect ESS of all the apps on your device if you think about it for a lot of people um you know as a developer
01:06:02
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
01:06:09
modern example of this is like what apps are on your home screen that's a privilege right and you know everyone
01:06:17
carries a lot of these apps on their phone and as as these devices become more and more connected there's a lot of
01:06:23
like like need for for cross communication between apps and I think where the real opportunities and where I
01:06:29
think like Android is a little 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
01:06:40
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
01:06:47
wait for Siri to catch up to like whatever the the most like upto-date or like latest like voice assistant is and
01:06:54
so I OS is a little bit slower on these things just because they own it end to end whereas like Google has a little bit
01:07:01
more flexibility and like they just expose the apis and let developers run with it so perplexity I think he
01:07:08
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
01:07:13
thing I could just like install it on my phone and now I have the perplex perplexity assistant if that's the case
01:07:19
for Apple you have to wait for them to integrate it into Siri and if the Apple intelligence rollout is any indication
01:07:25
yeah that's a great point doesn't look like it's going to be a a huge you know needle jumping movement anytime soon
01:07:32
yeah it's not going to change rapidly um I keep coming back to this analogy of uploading content to
01:07:38
different social media platforms and it's like if I were to recommend something right now I think picking one
01:07:45
platform and being native to it and being really good at it is a good idea mhm and if you upload that exact same
01:07:52
thing let's say to from YouTube you try to upload that to T Tok like the overlays are in a different place and
01:07:57
like the UI you can't like point to the button the same way you did on YouTube like you have to make more native content for that OS it's it's always
01:08:04
going to be more work to do it in more places yeah so that's not going to change anytime soon but yeah yeah the
01:08:10
way it starts is just it's up to the developer yep I feel like there will continue to be iOS only apps dominating
01:08:17
the stores yeah uh but I at least have hoped that somewhere down the line there will be some really cool Android only
01:08:23
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
01:08:34
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
01:08:40
person I think there could be a future in where that becomes desirable to be in that kind of like playing field and then all they got to do is get the money right because then we're all good if you
01:08:51
can compete on Apple the same way so to close out this apple versus Android slugfest I asked each of our new
01:08:58
developer friends to pick a side to try to recruit you The Listener to be a mobile developer either for apple or for
01:09:04
Android here's what they had to say oh you're screwing me here um that I mean the the the political answer would be it would wholly depend on the app um I
01:09:18
think if you're just like a oneperson team if if you can call it that um and you're looking to develop something I I would say like iOS if it's a very North American Market that you're targeting um
01:09:29
I would say like iOS is definitely like a solid bet like you're going to end up probably taking twice as long um it's
01:09:35
going to be twice as difficult just in terms of keeping your chickens in line um to develop for two platforms um
01:09:41
whereas iOS will let you get to like the majority of the market quicker um and and a more fruitful majority of the market um and at least let you see if this idea has legs um and then maybe if
01:09:53
it does like explore other options at that Point like maybe maybe you have an idea that you think would absolutely
01:09:58
crush on Android and and don't just you know throw away Android just because you have some preconceived notion like look
01:10:04
into it for sure um 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 building mobile apps is is
01:10:16
an experience of its own I would say I think you know I started building out or these like games and then did like webst but there was something very tangible of building something that showed up on
01:10:26
your phone and you know like I mentioned that you have the privilege of carrying with you in other places when I first
01:10:32
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
01:10:37
just like see what the experience is and and just like like obsessed over some of
01:10:42
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
01:10:54
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 pray around with it but
01:11:00
for me I think like being able to just like you know have an experience like Google The Google podcast app sort of
01:11:06
like going away and then the next weekend being like Oh like let me just I'm just going to build it out I'm going to build it out and it's going to work
01:11:13
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
01:11:24
your phone is your infrastructure rure like you know I don't have to have a back end for a lot of the stuff that I I
01:11:29
build and that's like super easy it's like if you want to do like something that like periodically fetches some some
01:11:35
like price for like uh a trading card or like a video game whatever whatever whatever it is um you can do that and
01:11:42
just like have it run on your phone and carry your phone all the time with you it runs in the background and that's like super fun um you can make games you
01:11:49
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
01:11:55
lot more more powerful now and you know if I'm like not writing code then I'm on my phone right like you're scrolling
01:12:01
you're like most of your experiences are on your phone and you know as much as there are there's like space for like other types of like engineering I mean being a mobile engineer is like
01:12:12
rewarding in its own own way I I'm going to throw you a wild card here I I would say as it probably came obvious from us
01:12:20
talking like start with iOS but I would definitely say give and a shot if you think your Niche exists on Android and you can Target that market I would say
01:12:32
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
01:12:45
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
01:12:58
um you'll have to pick one to dedicate your resources to at first small um if that's your situation pick Android EAS or pick iOS sorry easier to iterate but
01:13:09
when you get big enough don't ignore Android like test the waters see if you can do something there um and realize
01:13:15
that just like iOS it's going to take some time to get traction it's going to take some time to get users that respect
01:13:21
your app it's not going to be an overnight success um just because you have a successful IOS app It's Gonna
01:13:28
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 and I can agree
01:13:38
because I will be back on Android eventually at some point tomorrow by the time this episode goes out by the time I
01:13:44
edit this episode I will have convinced myself to go back to Android so thank you for joining me on this long journey
01:13:49
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
01:14:00
incentive there and fragmentation on Android isn't exactly a secret but I hadn't actually considered that there
01:14:05
are full grown teenagers and adults who are developing apps right now whose first experience was on iPhone so that
01:14:11
makes complete sense why they would be drawn to building for that platform and personally I completely underestimated
01:14:17
how big a role design and overall aesthetic plays into all of this but I have to say I cannot stop thinking about
01:14:22
what K said about Android having a superpower when it comes to the this AI boom that we're having I'm really
01:14:27
curious to see if there are any really compelling Android only apps just right around the corner I guess if that ends
01:14:32
up being the case then we'll just end up in the same problem but in Reverse with people developing for Android instead of
01:14:38
apple and then we're back in square one anyway Marquez wants to leave you with a pun the grass is greener ahh on the
01:14:46
Android side just saying I was going to go the opposite route as an Android User
01:14:52
no I I think the thing that stuck to me the most is that like we don't understand how many of these developers
01:14:58
are small Indie developers and I really liked what Christian said of like if you're working on that one thing you
01:15:04
think is great once you have to make for the other side you're taking time away so like the great Ron Swanson one said never half ass two things whole ass one
01:15:15
thing damn nice damn that's hard yeah wait but as an Android User that really screws me over so maybe half ass two things nice wa for is produced by Adam elen and
01:15:27
Ellis Ren we're partner with VOX media podcast Network and our intro outro music was created by vain Sil
01:15:36
[Music]