iOS vs Android, from a product team's chair
Compare and contrast the iOS and Android ecosystems for app development and distribution, highlighting the differences that would actually change a product decision.
Steps
- Pick a lens: a concrete app. Imagine your team is shipping a specific product (a food delivery app, a meditation app, your final project). Compare the ecosystems for that product, not in the abstract.
- Research the differences across:
- Design — Human Interface Guidelines vs Material Design; what the same screen looks like on each
- Development — native (Swift/Kotlin) vs cross-platform (React Native/Flutter) vs web/PWA; what each costs in fidelity and money
- Distribution — App Store vs Play Store: review times, rules, fees, who gets rejected and why
- Audience — market share where your users live; device diversity; who pays for apps
- Make a recommendation. For your imagined product: which platform first, or both, or PWA? One paragraph, defensible.
- Use AI as a research assistant, but verify anything that sounds like a number — store fees and review policies change, and models confidently cite stale ones.
Submission
- A comparison one-pager (table encouraged) + your recommendation paragraph. 5-minute presentation in class.