I have worked with various companies with iOS and Android teams and every time the Android team delivered code faster than the iOS team. Even a simple refactor of a variable name in 10 lines of code could crash it. I used AppCode when I code as Xcode is a feature poor IDE. I would write the app / screen / next thing in Android first then convert it over to iOS so I did not have to battle Xcode and Interface Builder any longer than I had to. Having worked in mobile for 10+ years doing both iOS and Android - in fact coding same app in both as sole developer for multiple companies - I have always found Android programming to be faster. I have not controlled for any variable here (at least as much as I should have). And these libraries are usually very powerful at what they do, once you know how to use them.īut again, this is just my anecdotal experience. I have my suspicions - maybe iOS allows for easy and quick start, but has limited customisation options, has a smaller ecosystem of great community libraries and is more restrictive to the developer, and so a highly experienced android developer, when presented with a feature request, immediately recognizes the stack of frameworks, components, libraries to use, even if there are technically many to pick from. I haven't done iOS for a few years now so I'm not up to date with the latest, though I know a bit about the architecture they tend to use and SwiftUI (which I like same as I like Compose). This is across multiple teams, multiple projects, and multiple different types of apps.

However, when teams were highly experienced, If anything I saw the opposite.Īnd lately, the difference is even more pronounced in Android's favor.

I remember clearly seeing articles around 2015 that iOS typically takes ~20% fewer resources/time across the same-sized teams.

However, I have anecdotal first-hand experience in essentially every case that I came across during my 6 year exposure to the mobile dev field. I am of the opinion that for a newbie, iOS would probably be (much) easier to pick up. Disclaimer: speaking from a perspective of an experienced lead.

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