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Hi Guys, it’s Chris. I haven’t written a blog post in ages. They’ve kept me locked in the basement like Milton Waddams, unwilling to let me out to see daylight until I finished X-Plane 10 Mobile. And they stole my #$%#^ stapler!

We recently released X-Plane 10 Mobile for iPhone/iPad and while the Apple users were ecstatic, some Android users were puzzled while others were frustrated.

“Will there be an android version?”

“When’s it coming to Android?”

“Where’s the Android version? 60% of all smartphones run on Android but I guess that Apple-Fan-Boys are more important in your company”

“Why do you guys constantly focus on iPhone first when most users are on Android?”

Before I get into the real point of the blog post, allow me to answer some of those questions. YES we are planning on shipping X-Plane 10 Mobile for Android. YES we have already begun development. We do not have a release date. We do not have any hints. The only thing that I can say, is that we want it out just as soon as you do. NO we do not view Android as a lesser/inferior platform…We value Android customers just as much as we value our iOS customers. A customer is a customer. I think we’ve demonstrated by supporting Windows, Mac and Linux all these years that we’re not trying to play favorites. We want everyone to be able to enjoy our products. BUT, that doesn’t mean that the costs of development and the speed and efficiency of development is equal on all platforms.

Historically, we’ve always developed for iOS first and then Android second. I’d like to be open an honest about our reasons and hope that even if you disagree with them, you’ll at least understand why we have historically developed for Apple first. I will warn you, everything I have to say is completely my opinion, my impression, my feeling based on my experiences. I’m going to sound a lot like an Apple “fanboy”. I will admit, I do have a high level of respect for Apple’s commitment to polish and detail, but I also own a dozen android devices and respect them for their cutting edge features, their openness and their friendliness to customization.

At the end of the day however, I’m paid to be efficient and thorough and my thoughts below explain why that means Apple has historically come first.

I will also warn you…I don’t want this blog post to turn into a flame war between Apple and Android users. We’re talking about phones here people, not religion. At the end of the day, they’re just small piles of plastic and silicon that let us surf the web, make phone calls and play games.

We Can’t Develop Apple and Android In Parallel

Sure, we do this on desktop by releasing Windows, Mac and Linux versions in unison 100% of the time. Developing for desktop is pretty different than developing for mobile. We use very few 3rd party frameworks on desktop and it’s an open environment. On a mobile phone, it’s a very closed environment. What this means is that developing Apple and Android in parallel requires a lot more effort than developing for Windows and Mac in parallel.

Can it be done? Absolutely! Plenty of companies are doing it. But they also have large teams with large expenses. We’re still a pretty small group of individuals and we like it that way. The tradeoff however is that we can only focus on one platform at a time.

One alternative that we could consider is delaying shipment of an Apple product until the Android version is done as well. That’s a loss for everyone. Apple customers lose out on having the latest software and Android customers may lose because…we don’t have the revenue coming in to support the Android development costs. That’s right…Apple sales get reinvested into the company to fund Android development!

As Ben mentioned earlier…Apple and Android mobile sales fund desktop development…and desktop development funds mobile development! This is a very important fact to remember. I’ll admit, we laugh and roll our eyes when desktop users complain about the company working on mobile products, and mobile users complain about the company working on desktop products….and android users complaining about us working on apple products and vice versa.

The company has found equilibrium creating both desktop and mobile products. There’s adequate revenue to fund adequate staffing to continue to develop both.

We Develop On Mac Hardware

This is no secret. It’s been this way since the company started. We just find Apple products allow us to be more productive and don’t get in our way.

Historically, Apple’s Mobile Platform Has Been More Mature

Apple had both a technological advantage as well as a time advantage over Android when they began.

Apple already had an Operating System, supporting frameworks and a development environment to leverage. Making mobile versions of those things required them to port existing, time-tested code to a new platform. From a stability standpoint, Apple had the advantage in that they already had the code, the engineers and the process in place to do this.

On the other hand, Google had to start from scratch. They had to put together a new team to create a new operating system to run new frameworks…and they had to create a set of tools for developers to use.

In addition to all of the technological advantages Apple had, they also had a head-start of well over a year. We were already selling X-Plane V9 for mobile before Android was even announced publicly.

That meant we were already established and familiar with the iOS platform as developers.

When I began the Android port for X-Plane V9, I had to pretty quickly put it down…and wait. Android at the time only supported Java apps. X-Plane is NOT a Java app. 99% of it is written in C/C++ and Android had absolutely no support at the time…and so we waited….and waited….and waited.

Finally, many months later, Android added their NDK which allowed us to have C/C++ support. But it was completely minimal. None of the standard libraries that we were used to using were available. This meant a lot of effort on our part to get anything done. If you’re not a developer, a reasonable metaphor might be a carpenter that’s trying to build a house, but he first has to build his own hammer, nails, square and saw because the tools he’s used to using don’t exist on this job.

Finally it came time to release V9 for Android. For iPhone/iPad, we uploaded our 400+mb app to their store and we were done. On Android however, the store had a limit of 25MB. So that meant we had to buy servers and write code to download the resources from a farm of servers. Again, this added more time and more complexity.

Apple Has Fewer Devices

For this latest release of X-Plane Mobile, we support iPhone 4S/5/5S/6/6+ as well as iPad 2/3/4/Air/Air2/Mini/Mini2 and iPod Touch 5. That’s 13 devices to my recollection. But it’s even simpler than that…because they all have the same GPU manufacturer, they all support the same PVR texture compression,  and they all pretty much just work interchangeably from a development standpoint. The only major differences between them are the processor speeds and the screen resolutions. We can literally test on every single device and be sure that the app runs the way we expect it to.

As of the time of this writing, our X-Plane V9 is running on 7,072 devices. You read that right….SEVEN…..THOUSAND…..DIFFERENT……DEVICES. Each device has a different combination of CPU, GPU, screen size, screen density and drivers. We cannot possibly test them all. Admittedly, many of them “just work” and there are of course only a handful of CPU and GPU manufacturers to worry about…but at the very least, it means at least three different texture compression formats. PVR is proprietary and unless the mobile device has a PowerVR chipset, they’re not going to get PVR. So we have to support various formats. That requires three different versions of our app to be created and tested and distributed. That requires three different resource packages to be created and tested.

There’s just no way to have the same level of stability as we can have with the iPhone/iPad platform.

Apple Has Higher OS Upgrade Adoption

Without carriers and other manufacturers getting in the way, Apple can release a new OS with features and bug fixes, and we can be sure that they exist on the majority of the devices that we care about in no time. This means that if there’s a driver issue that needs fixing, it will make it out to the masses and eventually the problem is gone.

Android’s fragmentation has really hurt them in this area. We encountered several devices over the years that violated some OpenGL spec. We worked with the manufacturer to isolate the issue. They release a patch to fix the issue…and most users never had a way to get the patch because their phone carrier dropped support for that phone model.

Now the user’s stuck with an App that they paid for that doesn’t work and there’s nothing that we can do about it.

We like Apple’s Developer Tools Better

As I mentioned earlier, Apple’s developer IDE has been around for ages. We have access to various performance analyzers and can now even analyze an entire OpenGL frame, one draw call at a time. This means we can really tune the crap out of the app before we make it public. In addition, all of the tools come in a single package that just works out of the box. Apple has also always had a simulator that’s hardware accelerated. This means for a lot of things, i don’t need a device plugged into the computer to debug something.

Android’s solution was for less “out of the box” in that they were using various open-source pieces that all had to be installed and fit together just right. Android had an emulator that was not hardware accelerated. It took longer just to boot than it took me to find a phone in my house, get it, plug it in and push an app to it.

Honestly, I think both sets of IDEs are sorely lagging behind features that Microsoft’s Visual Studio has had since 2000, but I digress.

TL;DR

We develop for Apple first because it’s easier and faster for us. It allows us to get the product out the door, running as efficiently and as reliably as possible. When we port the app for Android development, we can be sure that most bugs that come up are specific to Android and are therefore much easier to resolve in a timely fashion.

We are not playing favorites. We have no personal issues with Android and have no personal ties to Apple. The day that Android becomes the faster and easier platform to develop for, it will be the one that we develop for first. It’s just a business decision!

In the meantime, Android users should remember that the way things are currently being done means that they sometimes have to wait longer for new updates, but the updates that they receive will likely be more stable as they’ve been tested harder.

I will also note that we are closing the time gap between iPhone and Android releases. In the past, we were over a year behind on the Android release…because Android didn’t exist. 🙂 Now that it’s becoming more established, the gap should be shrinking more and more.

About Chris Serio

Chris is an electrical engineer and commercial pilot who got roped into software development by Ben because misery loves company.

38 comments on “Why Apple before Android?”

  1. WTF?!?! Who let Chris out of the basement?? The sign said “DO NOT EVER UNLOCK THIS DOOR UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES” for a reason!

    Just one bit of color commentary on the subject of coding for Android vs iOS:

    We were really early in getting X-Plane 9 Mobile onto the various app platforms we supported. We were on iOS using the first rev of the SDK and developer tools; we were beta testers of the Palm WebOS native SDK, and we jumped on Android as soon as Google -anounced- that native apps would be possible.

    After we finished iOS, I ported X-Plane 9 Mobile to Palm’s WebOS. We basically did it as a favor to one of the engineers who worked at Palm. The entire port took me two weeks of part time work on my own – it didn’t even fill up my entire work day. It was an incredibly easy port and the app just worked when we were done.

    When Chris then picked up the Android NDK (the SDK you use on Android to write native C++ apps), at the time there was -not even a complete C++ implementation-. Seriously – there was no RTTI or STL for the OS at the time. It took Chris -months- to do the Android port. And having done the port once already, we had reason to think that at the time the problem was the Android NDK and development environment in general, and not the portability of the code.

    So when Chris says that historically iOS is more mature, that’s a bit of an understatement; in the time frame that we did X-Plane 9 mobile, there wasn’t even complete C++ on Android, while there was a complete working native SDK on iOS.

    I certainly expect things to be different now! At the same time, Chris can’t add .cpp files to a target in the new Android Studio (the Android version of X-Code). So it will be interesting to see, if/when Chris completes an Android port, what the differential in development tools is now.

  2. There is one other really good reason to develop on iOS first: the platform monitizes better. I’m in the mobile game industry and we see a lot more money from iOS users than we do Android users. I won’t go into why this is because, for the most part, we don’t know for sure. But it is a fact. We do see that changing, though, and some games that have been released lately on both simultaneously are running about neck and neck. We anticipate that Android will be way ahead in the not-to-distant future. It is as simple as looking at the numbers. Apple will not be able to keep up. They will still have very valuable users but Android will have the bulk of the users.

    Thanks for the frank discussion. It sets you guys apart from other software companies.

    1. Good luck with that. There is no money to be made in Android, neither for hardware suppliers, nor for developers, neither now nor in the future. Samsungs smartphone sales declined by 20%, profits by 50%. How long you think they’ll sustain that decline? Android is mostly for people who can’t afford an iPhone, that’s the reality, and that’s why 80% of smartphone profits happen on iOS. Count in piracy, platform fragmentation and an erratic update policy, making my prediction like this: Android will be irrelevant for developers in the not-too-distant future. Unless, of course, you’re in the business of gathering and selling privacy data. Although, I wonder who’s interested in the buying habits of cheap skates?
      If you wanna bet on an alternative platform to iOS, better bet on Windows Phone. Microsoft has a brilliant history of not being bound by any morale standards and use their monopoly powers and the money from their cash cows to ruin the competition.

      1. Hi Udo,

        This is definitely -not- true. If our Android port of X-Plane 9 mobile had not been a net win revenue wise, we would not be looking to port X-Plane 10 mobile to Android. At the time we did the X-Plane 9 mobile port, “you can’t make money on apps on Android” was the conventional wisdom among iOS developers (and a concern for us doing the project) – we found the convention wisdom was wrong.

  3. Wasn’t it the Android port of X-Plane 9 that in part instigated the patent troll lawsuit against LR? Obviously, whatever part of that app that caused the suit doesn’t have to be part of the XP10 port. Just curious — I’m sure Chris wouldn’t be moving forward if the suit was still a big deal. Then again, maybe I’m horrendously misinformed. Please correct me if that’s the case!

      1. Pardon me while I excuse myself to go impersonate Homer Simpson. Thanks, Chris. I’m strictly a desktop user of XP, so I miss out on these sorts of things. 😉

  4. I’m the organizer of the Android meetup in Austin, Tx.
    I also run X-plane (on Linux), often with one or more Android tablets to give me a six-pack, moving map, or other cool stuff.
    So I’d probably be considered an Android fanboy.

    Having said that, almost all companies who cannot do parallel development, start with ios and port to Android. All the reasons that Chris gave are good ones. It doesn’t mean that Android is a lesser platform, it just means that for most teams, ios gets you off the blocks a bit quicker. Going cross-platform is harder than many realize.

    1. Hi Gregory,

      I just want to point out one detail about simultaneous cross-platform development vs. sequential that might not be obvious to non-developers.

      X-Plane 10 for desktop is simultaneously released on three platforms (OS X, Windows and Linux). But since the product _already_ functions on 3 platforms, the cross-platform cost to each platform is quite low – often there is no platform-specific code in a given update. So we can afford to be three-platform on desktop with no platform delay with almost no extra costs.

      X-Plane 10 mobile is virtually a complete rewrite of our mobile product; the original X-Plane 9 app was coded around one goal: “small”. the original X-Plane 9 app had to run on the original iphone, and thus it was squeezed and stripped very heavily. Smart phones have come a long way in the last few years, so X-Plane 10 represents a re-building of the product at a much higher level of technology.

      With XP10M’s _new_ development, we have to write a lot of platform specific code for all platforms we port to. It’s a very different situation than desktop, and it makes simultaneous cross-platform a lot more expensive. I suspect that after we have the product working on Android and iOS, we should be able to support both platforms at once, at least for small updates, just like desktop.

      One last consideration: sometimes the concern isn’t how much _work_ has to be done (e.g. how many hours of coding) but how much _technical risk_ there is, e.g. what is the percent chance that a nasty bug or problem shows up at the last minute for which the bug fix takes a long time. When porting to Android the scary factor is not the amount of work, it’s the technical risk. We can get a prototype of the app running on one Android device relatively quickly; however between that and actually shipping for Android (and expecting it will work on 7000 devices) is an ocean of technical risk.

  5. You said, “We Develop On Mac Hardware”

    Apple is damaging the computer industry.

    Your company and its products are now on my “Do Not Buy” list.

    1. And absolutely no one will miss you, or anyone else who thinks that anyone cares about their ideological hangups.

  6. Hey,
    What about Windows Phone development? You do understand that developing for Windows Phone is the easiest?

      1. Perhaps you should have a look at ANGLE (https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/). I don’t know whether it’ll completely fulfill your requirements, but it’s IMHO worth a look for wrapping the OpenGL calls into DirectX calls. At least it’s used in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and – optionally – in Qt: So it probably can’t be that bad.

        1. I think Chris is just leading the poster a bit – none of the ‘third OS’ contenders (WebOS, RIM, Windows Phone) have gotten enough market share to justify a third-platform port.

          I’m not saying we’ll -never- do one – just that it’s not competitive with our top priorities.

  7. Actually it’s because as developers, you ####### suck. Flying development studios managed to get their multiplayer update for infinite flight out before ios without coming up with a bunch of excuses. You people could do the same. You are in love with Apple and refuse to admit it. Apples certification process for apps frankly sucks and you’d Actually get a decent product out the door faster if you focused on android. You’re still ######### about the issues you had with them ‘re. Xplane 9 and just won’t admit it.

    1. Hi Dave,

      While this was one of my favorite comments to be posted to the dev blog, ever, I’ve had to edit it for language. Please hold back on the F bomb and friends if you want to post here.

      We made our decision about platform support, and other developers will make their choice, sometimes differently. The point of Chris’s post was to illustrate how we made our decision, so that people looking at app development from outside could understand why apps sometimes ship for iOS before Android. He’s not saying it would be impossible to ship for Android first, he’s saying why we chose not to.

      If you believe that the reasons Chris gave are false and that we were actually motivated by some kind of romance with Cupertino or latent frustration with the X-Plane 9 for Android development process, you’re welcome to think whatever you want. There isn’t anything I can say that’s going to dissuade you.

      1. thank you for being more professional with your response than the other guy, obviously you value customers more. See my response to him. I hope my position is better understood. Chris needs to learn how to respond to criticism better.

    2. Despite that fact that you’re clearly just trolling for attention, I’ll take the bait and feed you and address all of your statements. I won’t hold my breath in believing that I’ll actually having an intelligent discussion with you however.

      1) “You f–ing suck” – *yawn*
      2) “Flying development studios got their multiplayer update out” – What’s your point? That they did something for Android before iOS? You’re right! We could do the same. We choose not to. The blog article makes that pretty clear I thought.
      3) “You’re in love with Apple” – No, I love my family. Apple’s a company that makes products…ones that I was pretty clear I find to be more polished than many alternatives. But i use whatever is going to get the job done more efficiently. That’s got nothing to do with love. It’s a preference.
      4) “Apples certification process for apps sucks” – Apple’s certification process is slower than Android’s yes. It’s not ideal. We had to wait 8 days for approval. On android we’d have had to wait none. So far, developing for iOS first cost us 8 days.
      5) “You’re still butthurt about the issues you had with them” – What issues do you assume we had with them in V9 that would make us “butt hurt”? I actually find their developer support to be pretty great. I have many contacts at Google that I can use to get fast responses about technical issues. Also being an open source platform, I can answer many of the questions myself.

      You see…I think you’re just trying to vilianize us because you’re probably an Infinite Flight fanboy and an Android fanboy. That’s cool with me. It’s just an app and they’re just phones. I’m not really losing much sleep over your opinions.

  8. Actually I’m posting from an iPhone 5, prefer xplane 10 to infinite flight, and have purchased all content to date for it. But be honest, you always have been a bit biased toward Apple. Otherwise that excuse of a sim that passed for xplane 9 on android would have at least been brought up to the level of xplane hdef 4G. It never was, and then we have to wait for xplane 10 and you won’t even ESTIMATE a release date?

    Also Google has come very far with their dev tools, you guys make it sound like they basically don’t offer any dev tools. I thought the advances in the sdk was supposed to make porting easy. I just think your comments slight Google.

    More people are adopting android devices nowadays. And we could be a stronger customer base if many of us didn’t get discouraged and give up on the app before it’s even released. So making us wait in a way costs you guys sales.

    My comment about wait times for approval is because you could fix bugs quicker on android because you’d know about them faster. At least that’s what other devs say.

    The patent lawsuit is what I was referring to re. Problems with version 9. Could be it has nothing to do with your attitude toward Google but that wasn’t the impression I got.

    Listen, I understand your desire to keep the dev team small. But it’s high time you got some pcs to develop on and hired some expert android programmers.

    I’m sorry for the tone of my initial post and I hope this more clearly expresses my opinions. But in the end I have to say your product on iOS is incredible and I do look forward to your android release. I just hope we’re talking weeks and not months. I don’t want to be downloading xplane 10 on my Android phone when iOS users are getting xplane 11. And I also hope the android product is equal in all ways to the iOS version and optimized for it, not a sloppy low resolution port.

    Thanks for listening, and try to be a little more professional with your dealings with customers. You should never “not lose sleep” over the opinions of a potential source of revenue. That’s childish.

    1. Hi Dave,

      There are a few points in this comment that I can address:

      1. Parity of iphone 9 on iOS and Android. You are correct that there was never equal footing of product on Android vs iOS for v9 of the mobile product. This is why we do -not- assume that iOS outselling Android 4:1 for the v9 mobile product is a function of the platform. We didn’t offer the same product.

      But your assumption that the products were different due to Apple bias is incorrect. They were different because they were built at different times during a time that was both highly transitional for the app market -and- highly transitional for us because we were in the middle of building X-Plane 10 desktop, a project that took a very long time and got out of control from a project management timeframe.

      With X-Plane 10 mobile I think we will be able to offer something that is the same on both platforms, or at least a lot closer, because the APIs on both platforms and their stores are both mature now. (By comparison, when we released V9M on Android, Apple had just raised the app limit to 50 MB – and it _didn’t work_ on some phones due to manufacturers modding their internal partition scheme and a an app store bug. I cannot emphasize enough how primitive things were on Android when the very first V9M product came out for it.) So we may (for the first time) get a real sense of the relative “market value” of the two platforms in an Apples-to-Apples comparison.

      2. No estimated ship date. We literally -don’t have one-. I have no way to estimate how much time it will take to get the app running on a large enough percent of Android devices to ship the product. I have an estimate to an internal tech demo (e.g. Chris has the app mostly working on a Tegra tablet) but that doesn’t do us any good for shipping.

      And even if we did have an estimate (with huge error bars, e.g. it will be 1-6 months), that’s totally useless for us. If we announce 1 month, then when (most likely) it takes longer everyone is pissed that we’re late. If we announce 6 months then we pre-annoy everyone (since that’s a long time). There’s no way to win when the error bars are that big.

      3. Re: Google and their dev tools. Chris has already started the app port to Android, and so his comments are informed by the -current- state of development, not just past development. For example: as of this writing, you still cannot add a C++ source file to your project in Google’s IDE. Chris is very, very good at making bizarre third party SDKs work – he’s sort of an idiot savant in terms of making other people’s tech work even when it’s complex, convoluted, and requires you to make a lot of lucky guesses and psychic debugging leaps to get the tech working. Some of this unique skill set is -still- needed to make native apps work.

      This may be different in a year. Chris will have a better grasp on the situation when the port is done and I hope he will write up his experience. Things are better than the V9M days (when we didn’t even have a full conformant C++ 98 or the ability to attach GDB to a process). But I still have to observe two things:
      – Native development still appears to be complex and convoluted compared to native development for iOS, OSX, or Windows (desktop), and seems potentially out of reach for non-specialists.
      – We’ve had a completely integrated native development and debugging experience on iOS since iOS 2.0, hence our sense of “how is this still not done on Google.”

      None of these statements apply to _Java_ development on Android – our impression is that Java dev is where Google’s real focus is, particularly when we see things like full IDE support for Java and basically none for C++. But we develop a high performance native app, so that’s the part of the tool chain that applies to us, and it will also apply to any serious core 3d games.

      4. Making Android users wait costs sales. This is definitely true. Making iOS users wait would cost us sales too. Chris’s blog post is an attempt to describe the relative costs of each and why we tried to minimize the down side and maximize the upside.

      5. You are correct that shipping bug fixes is faster in the Google play store since there is no app review.

      6. Our view of Android is -not- colored by the patent law suit; we don’t view the lawsuit as being Android specific or Google’s fault. Rather, we think the problem of patent trolling is ubiquitous and frankly equally likely to happen on iOS. (The lodsys trolling happened before the suit we were involved in.) I shouldn’t say more about this because commenting on the ongoing litigation is above my paygrade. But Austin has said plenty about the lawsuit and the patent system in general; if you read what he has said “on the record” you’ll get a pretty good view about the companies opinion and approach to patent trolling.

      7. “Hire more developers”. The LR developer team has actually grown significantly over the past 5 years. And it may grow more. But I hear “hire more developers” suggested by users as a panacea for lots of things we have or haven’t done, and my response is the same:

      – Read “the mythical man month”.
      – Understand that scheduled times to ship on products -do not- become shorter by adding more warm bodies.

      Project ship times are limited by -scope-. One way to understand this is to (as I have done) learn from the school of hard knocks: take a big project, don’t cut scope, add more warm bodies, and watch what happens. One of the main points of Chris’s post is that doing our platform ports -sequentially- was a way to limit scope and ship faster.

      I actually believe that this is a case where the sum is greater than the parts: had we tried to ship both platforms at once, the larger scope of the single project would have taken LONGER to ship than doing iOS first and Android second.

      8. Re: tone and “try to be more professional”, I don’t know what to tell you. You went to the comments section of the developer blog, where you have to assume the actual developers are, since we respond to comments on a regular basis, and you started your post with “as developers, you f—ing suck.” I don’t know how you can call that anything but trolling.

      So there are really only two ways that it can go: you can act like an irate customer and demand that the norms of American customer service be followed (“no matter how obnoxious I am to you, you have to treat me with respect, because I paid money for your product, and the customer is always right”) or you can act like an informed developer and have an actual discussion on complex topics.

      But we really can’t do both. We’re not going to run a developer blog where we have the actual developers answering questions directly -and- politely saying “yes sir, of course sir” no matter what kind of rant gets posted.

      1. Hello Ben, and Merry Christmas!

        Thanks for the quick and detailed response. First of all
        I’d like to say that I fully understand that my original post was abrasive and I shouldn’t have approached my concerns with the tone that I did. This conversation became much more productive when I toned it down and actually posted in a way that made sense.

        I also understand where laminar research is coming from and overall I see your approach leads to a higher quality product for all platforms. I commend you for not doing a slow, lazy port in Java for the android platform and didn’t realize Google was so far behind with their C++ development tools.

        In short I understand where I went wrong in my original post, and I understand why things are the way they are. I can fully accept waiting to get a decent product. And I am much better imformed now. I also want to apologize to Chris for my negativity.

        The TL;DR of it all is that you guys do NOT ******* suck, you make a great sim. One that is frankly amazing. And I wish you the best of luck with your android release. I’m sure there will be lots of sleepless nights supporting that many dissimilar devices. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that mobile development is more like console development, and less like developing for the PC. Considering the scope of the project it’s amazing you can get these things working at all.

  9. By the way, I hope I proved your insult to
    my intelligence wrong, and that I made more sense in my posting this time. Happy Holidays to you, sir. And I do apologize for the tone of my first post.

  10. By the way, I humbly offer my services beta testing the Android version on my 2013 Nexus 7 on 5.0.x and my AT&T Moto X 2014 running 4.4.4

  11. by the way, thanks for even taking the time to have this discussion. I’m thankful you didn’t simply delete my posts and ignore me. Being an informed customer, that really meant a lot to me.

    1. My comment was not meant to insult your intelligence, merely your perceived desire to have a discussion of substance.

      In any event, apologies accepted. I’ve been called worse names…mostly by my wife. 🙂

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