Comparing prices

Let’s compare some prices.

iOS:

• Xcode is free
• You have to pay $99 per year in order to submit games to the AppStore.

Android:

• The SDK and NDK are free
• There is a $25 one-time-only fee in order to submit games to Google Play

Windows Phone 8:

• VS Express 2013 and Windows Phone 8 SDK are free. If you want something more complete, you can get VS Online Pro for $45 per month, or VS Pro (offline version) for $499.
• You have to pay $19 as an individual or $99 as a company per year in order to submit games to the Windows Store

Random thoughts:

• Price-wise, Android is the cheapest.
• Quality-wise, Android is also the cheapest. Developing for the NDK is very expensive (time-wise). So in the end developing for Android is much more expensive than developing for iOS (I don’t know yet how expensive is to develop for WinPhone).
• iOS developers’ experience is years ahead of Android’s. Developing and debugging for Android’s NDK reminds me when I was developing for Linux in the 90s. Google, come one, please give us a good C++ IDE for the NDK.
• You can develop Android apps using Mac, Windows or Linux. But you need a Mac to develop for iOS. And you need a PC in order to develop for Windows Phone.
• Xcode became a great IDE. Not only because of compiler improvements, but also of how well it is integrated with iOS: OpenGL Frame grabber, GPU analysis, memory leak detection, CPU profiler, etc.
• Six years ago, Visual Studio was the best IDE out there. It was way ahead of Xcode. I’m eager to use VS again. I’ll let you know my findings.