Ios Vs Android - an In-Depth Analysis of Two Premier Mobile Platforms

iOS & Android

An in-depth analysis of two premier mobile platforms

GROUP 3

Xi Chen

Wannaporn Dechpinya

Sanket Kandharkar

Ketaki Potkar

Joey Raudabaugh

12/4/2010

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 1

iOS ................................................................................................................................. 2

BECOMING AN iOS DEVELOPER ....................................................................... 3

GETTING STARTED ............................................................................................. 4

THE FIRST iOS APPLICATION ............................................................................ 6

iPHONE APPLICATIONS ...................................................................................... 7

iOS DEVELOPERS ............................................................................................... 9

ANDROID ...................................................................................................................... 12

BECOMING AN ANDROID DEVELOPER ............................................................ 12

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY STRUCTURE .......................................................... 14

DEVELOPER CHALLENGES AND OPINIONS .................................................... 15

MARKET PLACE & DEVICE ANALYSIS .............................................................. 18

CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 21

REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 22

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ABSTRACT

This paper delves into the Developer side of the iOS and Android platforms. In order to

fully understand the developer aspect of these platforms, one must first learn about the

operating systems that the developers interact with. The main aspects of the developer

side of these platforms are how one becomes a developer, application policies,

application distribution, and the market place. The application market place is where

one can truly compare the two. Finally, this paper will draw several conclusions

regarding both operating systems and their viability as a successful platform for

developers.

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iOS

In this part, we will focus on how to become an iOS developer. We will cover basic

information regarding iOS, procedures to register to be a developer, steps to develop a

program, and tools used in iOS development.

iOS Overview

Before getting into how to develop an iOS program, we would like to introduce some

basic concepts of iOS.

iOS is a mobile operating systems developed by Apple. It is composed of operating

systems and technologies that developers use to run applications on Apple's devices.

iOS was originally used in only iPhone, but had been extensively applied to other

Apple's devices such as iPod Touch, iPad, and Apple TV. iOS shares some common

features with Mac OS X technologies. However, some additional functions are added to

be used on mobile environment. For example, the user interface of iOS is based on the

concept of direct manipulation, which allows users to directly manipulate objects

presented to them using actions that correspond at least loosely to the physical world.

The example of direct manipulation is when iPhone users resizing an object on the

iPhone screen. Moreover, iOS uses multi-touch gestures and supports accelerometer.

Depending on the model, iOS consumes approximately 500 megabytes of the device's

storage.

As of now, the current version of iOS is Version 4. It was announced in April 2010, three

days before iPhone 4 releases. iOS 4 introduced some new features such as

multitasking, threaded email, and several business-oriented features.

iOS Architecture

At the high level, iOS acts as an intermediary between the underlying hardware and the

applications that appear on the screen. Applications that developers create never

interact directly with the hardware but instead go through system interfaces, which

interact with the appropriate drivers. This abstraction protects an application from

changes to the underlying hardware.

The implementation of iOS is composed of four abstraction layers as shown in Figure 1.

Four layers include Core OS layer, Core services layer, Media layer, and Cocoa Touch

layer.

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Figure 1: iOS technology layers

The lower layers,