Journal 3: Grønli, T.-M.; Hansen, J.; Ghinea, G.; Younas, M., "Mobile Application Platform Heterogeneity: Android vs Windows Phone vs iOS vs Firefox OS," Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA), 2014 IEEE 28th International Conference on , vol., no., pp.635,641, 13-16 May 2014

Daniel Lewis

Summary: The latest article I read was finally scholarly instead of a newspaper article. It basically states how the mobile application development has taken a huge leap from its first says to now. The authors break down four platforms for applications. Android and iOS in particular. They then investigate the key issues in mobile application development. In previous generations of phones aspects in programming were limited my obstacles like bandwidth and screen size. Nowadays those issues aren't as common because unlimited date and large screens. Android uses the Linux kernel for developers to write code into applications. They are constantly improving and collaborating with the developing community. iOS is the operating system for Apple and it uses Objective-C language for programming. An exclusive feature to this is automatic reference counting that reduces code and save memory. Development for iOS requires a Mac computer. Out of the two Android is the more popular platform because of the large customer base. Its challenges are fragmentation which is when the version is updated and users do not upgrade. It means that Android has to support multiple versions. iOS does not have this issue because Apple is the only manufacturer of iOS and requires downloads.

Synthesis: Unlike the other two articles this one focuses on the platform and development of applications as opposed to features that developers have come up with in the other articles. One thing the articles have in common is the awareness that Android has the largest customer base because of its variety in hardware.

Think: This article has taken me deeper into thinking about which operating system is really better. From what I just read developing applications on the Android OS seems to be a little easier but they have problems with making those applications compatible with previous versions of Android, creating fragmentation. Apple and the iOS platform is better at managing code and making applications essentially lighter. This means that less RAM has to be taken up by doing the same thing another operating system would be doing. Android handles this by physically adding more RAM. iOS also does not have the issues with fragmentation because the number of their devices is limited. This makes me think that for developers it is easier to produce an application for the iOS platform. I need to dive deeper into what makes one better than the other from the point of the consumer as well because this article was from the developers side exclusively.

Question/Plan: I would still like to get into the hardware but I'm realizing this may be more difficult because Android has so many different phones from different manufactures to offer. This may be one of the selling points though, They can offer very expensive phone to high-end "iPhone killer" type phones.