The Road Map as it now is . . . . .

Colin Holgate coiin at verizon.net
Sun Aug 17 11:49:07 EDT 2014


Couple of things to think of, with regard to Android and iOS potential market:

Apps that go into Google Play show a figure, which represents the number of devices that your app is compatible with. That number has gone over 6,000. With iOS, if you include all the iPod touches and iPads, as well as iPhones, it’s probably still below 25. As for the OS version people have, with iOS you can be pretty certain the user is going to have iOS 7, with a few percent who are on iOS 6 or earlier. With Android you can be even more certain that the user does NOT have KitKat. So, producing features to support Android has to be more complex.

For apps I’ve done that are in three Android stores (Google Play, Amazon Appstore, and Samsung’s app store), and are also in iTunes, the iTunes figures are many times the combined total of all Android sales.

So, Android’s market share of devices doesn’t translate to potential income for app developers, and the wide range of OS releases, and hardware variations, makes it a harder platform to support.

As an example problem that can occur, in the app I’m finishing up now there is one section that is in portrait, and another section that is in landscape. The app opens in portrait, then changes to landscape when you go to the other section, and on almost all Android devices thing go well. On Nexus 7 though, the reported screen width and height when in landscape are the same values that were given in portrait. But the task bar is now at the bottom of landscape and not the bottom of portrait, so clearly the width of landscape and the height of portrait cannot be the same! Turns out this is a known issue for Nexus 7, and fortunately I have a work around for the issue. For a few days though it looked like the other 6,000 Android devices would not get to see the app, because we wouldn’t be allowed to submit it because of the Nexus 7 issue.

None of what I’ve said means that LiveCode shouldn’t support Android better! But the difficulties and the potential gains are not as obvious as you might think.


On Aug 16, 2014, at 11:12 PM, Peter Haworth <pete at lcsql.com> wrote:

> >Even though I don't develop for iOS/Android (yet!), I have to agree with
> this. Android has a huge market share on phones and tablets compared to
> iOS, yet it seems that LC support for Android is lacking compared to iOS.




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