Android moves more phones, but that’s _not_ the right metric for considering which platform to develop for first. First, it’s an indirect metric – there’s no reason to believe that your unit sales will be directly proportional to unit sales on both platforms. Android controls the whole low-end market, and it shouldn’t be surprising that that doesn’t translate into massive app sales numbers for developers.

Second, the development cost and time to market are a concern too, and developing for -one- GPU and iOS 8 is a much narrower target than developing for 4 Android GPUs (all with different performance characteristics, architectures, compressed texture formats and driver stacks) and a wider spread of OS versions.

We’re not the only app developer doing iOS first – in fact, at this point “Android first” is the exception. Our experience from the original iOS version, the original Android port, and the original Palm port* validated iOS first. If we succeed in shipping an Android version of X-Plane 10 mobile, we’ll be in a position to update our experience on cross-platform development and see if iOS first still makes sense. But for X-Plane 10 mobile we had to rely on our X-Plane 9 mobile experience, which clearly dictated iOS first.

Cheers
Ben

* I mention the Palm port, which took me literally two weeks of part time work, because it provides a benchmark for how fast the X-Plane 9 mobile product -could- be ported to another platform, when new development tasks were removed and the goal was just “Get this running on a totally new phone.” The answer was that if the phone’s development kit was well put together and the hardware target was narrow, the port could be really really fast.

At the time of X-Plane 9 mobile, Android was held back primarily by an immature development tool chain – so it is possible things will be different. But one more consideration: we found not particularly good GPU performance on -some- Android devices – there was a huge variance in quality of OpenGL ES drivers. Because Android came out after X-Plane 9 mobile, and because X-Plane 9 mobile had low graphics requirements to run on the original iPhone, the Android port mostly functioned by running on much more powerful devices than the original product despite software inefficiency at the driver/OS level.

I don’t think that is going to work for X-Plane 10 mobile – we want to be able to take advantage of the full GPU power of “big” devices like the iPhone 6 and the iPad air 2. These are mobile devices that have near-desktop performance levels. There are Android devices with these kinds of specs; I can only hope that the software stack is now efficient enough to let us use them fully.

Hi Ben – I think he is implying that he finds it funny that you choose to release for iOS as a priority over Android since the latter has the bigger market share.

http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-v-android-market-share-2014-5

I can understand its easier what with the limited number of devices (and arguably marginly better graphics performance) but its sad to see nonetheless. Android IMO is the better (and obviously more ubiquitous platform) yet remains second consideration for some developers. Bottom line consideration for your company though is which platform gives you most return.. assume this is iOS given your choice.

Small a quick off-topic question I’ve already asked you a long time ago:
Friendly performance-wise 3D trees anytime soon? Moving in the wind?
Included in X-Plane 10.40 to-do list?

That’s my small eye-candy wish…
Cheers!
Keep the good pace at work!

My request:

Add Google Cardboard video format (HMD) option and support external joysticks on X-Plane 9 for Android. Immersive Flight Sim on the cheap!

P.S. Using my X-Plane 10 for Windows to practice before and after real world Sport Pilot lessons is proving quite valuable. Now I can practice without spending $100+/hr wet.

I would like to request a blog post on the current efforts and on the immediate future of the development path. Priorities do change, and we all have our favorite little niggle. So while you’re letting us look inside LR for just a bit, perhaps one step further? We know how hard it is to promise and please everyone, but some of us have been hoping for some particular fixes for a while now. I would list them, but then again, I’m not trying to start a forum like thread here. What can you say, Ben?

Nulios, please use your words. If you have a point to make, please make it in a simple, clear and direct post. Spare me the guessing games and hints.

Ben really you don’t know what is the best selling mobile OS?
I am sure you do. Not going to be the bad boy here, if you guys choose to ignore the stats, no problem with me, it is your company. 🙂

Linuxuser and Alex: first, please tone this down a notch. If this turns into a forum-style flame war I’m nuking everyone’s comment. 🙂

Second, you guys should discuss this directly off-line. Here’s why:

http:/2012/05/linux-and-hardwareos-abstractions/

Linuxuser, the short of it is that we (LR) do not hope to make a seamless flight experience the way we do on Windows/Mac. So _if_ you are hitting an issue specific to Linux, your best bet is to compare notes with other Linux users to identify a stable configuration.

Mind you, there may actually be a problem in 10.31 that needs to be fixed – in which case, it is also likely to fix all users. I am definitely not saying that we are not going to fix bugs. What I am saying however, is that if/when X-Plane works for everyone else -and- you’re on Linux, you’ll need to take this up with other Linux users and not us.

Alex don’t presume to know the specs of my PC and the rendering settings I have enabled. I have tried every combination of rendering setting. Its not attitude if you don’t happen to agree with a post, it’s simply my point of veiw. If your best response is to blame somebodys “crappy hardware” or their rendering settings without asking what their hardware is or what rendering settings they use then I think you need to grow up.