Why we chose the iPhone vs. Android for our app

Developing a mobile application is the number one goal of almost all startups these days. Without it you're just not sexy enough. DishClips is no exception. In fact, being that DishClips is the Social Video Guide for Restaurant Dishes, our application is really a mobile application.

Trouble is, contrary to popular belief, mobile applications cost a lot of money to produce. There's the server side components and API, the graphics, sounds, UI design, UI programming, testing, marketing and hundreds of hours of constant pivoting is required to produce a worthy mobile application that has any social ties. At a minimum, you're looking at $15k + 3 months of time to get your first iteration released to the market. And that doesn't including any marketing costs. Also worth noting, is that the cost of developing an iPhone app and an Android app is nearly the same as developing two different applications. That is to say there isn't much gained in the way of leveraging one towards the other. So while developing an iPhone app might cost you $15k, developing on both platforms will likely cost close to $30k.

The fact that most startups are cash strapped not withstanding, it doesn't make much sense to develop the app for both platforms at the same time. The two platforms have different audiences and different advantages. Additionally, the lessons learned while developing on one platform can be leveraged when developing for the second platform. An advantage that is lost if you're developing for both platforms simultaneously. It is not surprising then that most applications are developed for one platform first and then for the other.

So how do you make the decision on which to develop for first? Here's a list of things we had to consider and so can you.

1) Who is our audience? As a social video guide to restaurant dishes we're targeting the 20-45 crowd in major metropolitan areas with dispensable income who can afford to eat out several times a week. As it turns out the cross section of this population with the iPone-Owner world is over 75% vs. 45% for Android users. This made our choice a lot easier.

2) What does your app have to be good at? For instance, our app has to be great at video capture and geo-location. The video capture quality of the iPhone 4S is consistently great. On Android devices however, depending on the device the experience may vary. It will likely take several days of quality testing on multiple devices to ensure the same quality on an Android device as it does on an iPhone device when it comes to video capture. Precious times that startups like DishClips just can't afford.

3) What is your competition doing? Being a startup has lots of great advantages. Being small is one of them. The big competition in our market segment like Yelp does lots of research on our behalf. We looked at several foodie applications on both iPhone and Android before making our final decision. It turns out that the adoption rate of iPhone apps within foodies is far greater than that of Android apps in the same localities within the United States.

Our application is currently in it's second beta release and we're super excited about it's upcoming release in early August 2012. We've learned so many things while developing our application that have changed the original design tremendously. I cannot imagine the additional costs we would have had if we were making all these changes on two separate development platforms. We're also learning that what will work on the iPhone seldom works the same on Android so the UI design elements will have to be completely redesigned for our Android application which we're currently wire-framing. I'll leave the differences between the two for another post.

Instant Ubiquitous Access to Actionable Information

Sounds great right? I mean who would argue that instant access to information is a bad thing? Some might even think we have that now. What with smartphones permanently attached to our hands we're a living, breathing encyclopedia of information. But what is information anyway? At the heart of it there are two types of information. Actionable and In-actionable (I know that's not a real word).

The Internet is filled with in-actionable information. That is information, that once understood, doesn't prompt any new action. Like the air-speed velocity of an African swallow. It might be interesting, but it's not quite actionable. It certainly is something that can be researched and discovered almost instantly.

And example of actionable information might be the supply and demand information for heating oil in the Southern California region for the past three months. Now if I knew that information I might be able to make some real decisions. There are dozens of companies (Mostly startups) working on just that kind of information delivery today. And while that sounds awesome, I invite you to consider that it's eventually not very good for business.

For years, retailers have depended on the inequity of information on the part of the buyer to make a profits. I remember years ago when I was in high school and I went out to buy what every high-schooler wanted at the time. A booming car stereo. I went to the local Good Guys (or Circuit City) or whatever other thing it was called that's not in business any more. The guy behind the counter rattled off a bunch of terms like "Cross-over", "EQ", and "highs, mids, and lows" then pointed me over to an Alpine unit that cost $400. At that point, in 1993, he was my entire source of knowledge. There was really no other way I could find out more information about that unit and how well it compared to other units unless I waited for Car Audio Magazine to do a comparison story on it. And even then I'd have to wonder if it was a sponsored advertorial or a real story. What's more is, I really had no way of finding out if I was being charged a fair price for the unit or not. For all I knew the store 6 blocks away was selling the same unit for $200. So in 1993, or for that matter the thousands of years that proceeded 2008(ish), the retail world depended on this inequity of information to make money. Retailers could literally charge 1000% on most products without ever being questioned and consumers had no way of ever finding out if they'd be had. This is how retail has worked for thousands of years.

Last week I walked into a Bed Bath and Beyond to buy a fabric steamer for our green screen. There were 6 models on the shelf. I scanned all the UPC codes on each one and within seconds read dozens of reviews on each product and determine which was the right unit for me. What's more is I compared prices with several thousand other retailers around the country and decided that I was getting a fair price for the steamer I picked up. Bed Bath and Beyond was not able to make more than just a few percent profit on this bulky unit that takes up several feet of shelf space. Good for me, bad for them.

This phenomenon is very similar to what occurred in the late 1800s with the advent of the Telegraph. Prior to the Telegraph, speedy horsemen and train conductors would deliver information on pricing and trends from town to town to secure large profits on commodities. If the price of gold or cattle had gone down by 20% for example, the first vendor that had access to that information in a city could afford to lower his prices in anticipation of a new and cheaper shipment. He could potentially beat the competition by days. When the Telegraph first was introduced to the market place, the inequity of information widened and retailers had to learn to be more agile and update their information sources. It took decades for world to catch up to this new method of communication. In the mean time some extreme fortunes were made on day old information. Some today liken it to knowing the lottery numbers, days before they're announced. Imagine if you, in California, know something about the price of gold days before anyone else did.

Consider that what I was able to do with my iPhone is still not available to more than 70% of the US population. What will become of retail when there's always some vendor, somewhere across the country that's willing to make only pennies on the sale of the same product? You guessed it, they can't survive.

Many brands are keenly aware of this phenomenon and are putting in measures to correct for it. LuluLemon, Oakley, and Apple for example have retail stores of their own and fix prices on their branded products so the consumer is always aware and confident of the pricing they're getting.

This ever narrowing information gap applies to far more than retail however. It applies to everything. If you had real-time, actionable information about every company listed on the NYSE for example, you might make some better trades. But if everyone had the same information instantly, what would happen? Mind you I'm not talking about news, I'm talking about actionable, decision-ready information. For instance, imagine a decision support system that would determine the price of Oranges based on thousands of metrics and could also provide you with actual demand information world wide, minute by minute. Now imagine that information was available to everyone. How difficult would it be to make money trading Oranges then?

It is difficult to imagine that the information gap can get so narrow. But who would have thought ten years ago that I, the consumer, would be able to stand inside a store, and find out the prices for thousands of competing products and vendors within seconds and make actionable decision about my purchase?

Online shopping engines like Amazon will eventually eradicate all retailers. But what will become of the marketplace that runs capitalism when the information gap collapses? Will the spirit of competition be enough to win? Only time will tell.

How I would save Research In Motion (RIMM)

Every week there's news of some new device RIM is coming out with that's going to be a supposed game changer. Well I have some news for the stockholders and executives at RIM. The device is NOT the problem. The OS is. It has nothing to do with how fancy your new device is anymore. I don't care if you get a Giga-Pixel camera, and a fold-able 32" OLED display squeezed into a phone that has a keyboard attached to it. If you can't motivate developers to develop new applications for your platform then you're dead on arrival. Learning a new development toolkit is a real commitment for us developers. We have to do tons of reading and debugging before we can get that very first app to even open a window. And when we finally create an app, we'd like to be ensured that there's a real mechanism for distribution and an actual audience for it. In short, RIM needs to adopt Android as it's operating system and it needs to do so immediately.

The next Black-Droid or Driod-Berry must run the Android operating system and it must also have a dozen native apps for the avid BB-addict. Features like an alert light, and BBM need to be app driven and ready at first boot. The form factor of the device can still resemble whatever it is that BB-lovers love so much about this relic of a company, but the innards need to support the Android operating system.

I hear analysts on CNBC talk ad nauseam about the many patents RIM still holds and how the company still has some inherent value. Really?? That's like saying Sony is worth something because they hold the patent to the VCR. Patents are only worth something if they're still relevant. In the new mobile world, RIM patents hold very little value other than those that have direct enterprise application.

So what's the plan RIM execs? Doird or Bust!