At DEMO 2012, young startup companies making inroads to the mobile market faced a tough decision - to develop their first apps for Android or iOS?
DEMO 2012 was energized by competitive teams launching new products. Much effort went into optimizing every waking movement of the competitors’ time at the conference. Time is money and winning recognition at DEMO shortens the time to investors’ and customers’ dollars.
This DEMO was heavily weighted to mobile. Most of the mobile apps are first releases and the teams needed to choose between building for Android or iOS for their commercial introductions. Interestingly, most apps had unique requirements that made cross-platform strategies employing HTML5 or jQuery impossible. This necessitated picking one platform, building native and then with a design and user acceptance rebuilding the app as a native app for the other platform.
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Looking under the hood, one learns from these entrepreneurs that their choice of platform was made with the same pragmatic focus on getting to investor and customer dollars via the most optimal path that rules their existence.
Lifestylefeed.com built the mobile version of their website for Android first. Lifestylefeed is a site that hosts short video tours and promotions for local restaurants, clubs, and entertainment venues. An advertisement-driven website that could go mobile and understand the consumer’s use of the site quickly was CEO Leon Harvey’s goal. Much of the decision was based on content. With a backlog of flash video hosted on YouTube, and the ease of integration with video wrappers used on his site, Harvey launched with Android. The web app is providing useful feedback for defining the features for an effective native app. Harvey said that “iOS is in development, but the release of a commercial product will depend on Google completing their HTML5 video beta because iOS does not support flash.”
Givit, a company also based on video-intensive mobile apps, made a different choice in selecting iOS for their latest commercial release. Givit lets users edit video content directly on the mobile device they used to film it. Video highlights make much more compelling shared content. Givit users can edit videos to include special effects, such as slow motion, music and transitions, to polish the video.
One of the better-resourced companies at DEMO, Givit CEO Greg Kostello said the company’s choice was determined “by resource utilization, time to market, user interface and market size.” Editing and special effects require the hardware encoding and recoding of H.264 video that is easily accessible to developers via an iOS API, which was the deciding factor. The iOS platform moves quickly to new versions so Kostello could count on this important feature being almost universally available. Kostello used the iOS enterprise version to distribute release candidates to UI testers and the media so that he could gain the benefit of a large audience using embedded analytics to report usage and user behavior. From concept to commercial release candidate it took Kostello and his team only five months to produce a commercial release. Kostello is “very impressed with the camera technology on Android phones released in the last year.”
“Building this app for Android was not an alternative when the app was first designed because the many versions of Android would have required a software approach to encoding and re-encoding, which would have produced a poor UI unacceptable to the user,” Kostello says. But he added that “the growth and capabilities of the Android 4.X market is becoming more attractive and will be a target for a future release.”
InTooch, a contact manager with the ability to trace a person’s social media identity and populate a contact record by recognizing the phone number, chose Android for their first release. From a development perspective, the design could run on Android 2.3 to Android 4.X, covering most of the market. Company founder Julien Salonon wanted “to begin with an MVP [minimally viable product] release and take advantage of search-driven testing of his first releases to a very broad audience. Release testing often included more than 600 downloads.” Android was the better choice of this method of rapid release iteration and user testing.
It is clear that there is no one-size-fits-all platform for a first commercial release. In most cases a highly differentiated app will be a native app, so the design, development and usability testing plan that produces a successful commercial release the most quickly is the right one. A second platform version requires less time, because there needs be fewer iterations of the product design and there should be investor or revenue dollars available to spend to build it based on the successful release of the first product.
