Let’s compare some prices.

iOS:

Android:

Windows Phone 8:

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.