The two major smartphone OS market holders Android and iOS. Between Android, developed by Google and iOS, developed by Apple, the market share of Android is much bigger than the iOS as it is open-source and used by many manufacturers whereas Apple only use iOS for its own smartphone series iPhones.
Apart these systems having a lot of similarities, these platforms are very different in terms of design and development and even market strategies.
First, we see the design differences in both the smartphone’s OS:
- In iOS, the name of preceding tab, current tab and action button are provided.
In Android, the Drawer menu, name of current tab and overflow menu is provided with back button as an optional choice.
- In iOS, the navigation items are arranged horizontally in the bottom bar.
In Android, the navigation items are arranged all over the screen including, top bar and floating buttons.
- In iOS, secondary navigation bar is found in the more tab in the bottom of the screen
In Android, secondary navigation bar is found in the drawer menu in the top navigation bar.
- In iOS, we have back button on the top left navigation or we slide left to go back a page.
In android, we have a back button on the bottom of the navigation bar provided by the OS.
- In iOS, the buttons that are used are usually flat with no shadows and contain text in title case.
In Android, the buttons usually have shadow and they use upper case text.
Now, coming to development part:
Both the platforms have different development approaches such as different programming languages, testing methods and so on.
- Development environment
Android uses Android Studio for developing its applications which is made by Google in 2013. It has various features like cross-platform support and debugging related features.
iOS relies upon Xcode tool which is backed up by Apple. It also provides a variety of bug fixing features and support wide range of devices.
- Design differences
iOS has a smallest clickable area of 44px whereas Android has smallest clickable area of 48px.
Android apps are developed in partitions. The development team have to break the app down to parts and activities. An activity is what’s present on the screen of the app.
iOS application architecture is divided in view controllers like page view, tab, split view controllers, and many more. A view controller is used to control an entire screen or a particular area inside it.
- Complex Development
Android app development is much more complex than iOS app development. iOS devices are much lower in number than android devices so, they have a specific screen optimization but android is available for a lot of devices with different screen sizes. Therefore, iOS apps are easier to build compared to android apps.
- Market share
Android has a dominating market share of 71% compared to iOS 28%. Therefore, Android OS has a much larger user base than iOS.
Conclusion:
As both of the smartphone OS have a significant user base it is important to build apps that can run on both Androids and iPhones. We can build apps for both the platforms using cross-platform frameworks as they reduce the development cost of apps compared to building apps for the native platforms, they also provide features such as code reusability, unified code for both the platforms. But there are some problems such as complex code designing, user experience limitation and longer waiting time for implementing new features.