Panel Question: Which Platform First?
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Rooster Teeth Expo in Austin, Texas. For those of you who don’t know what RTX is, it’s an exposition put on by the company who made Red vs Blue years ago. I have been working on building an app for Gamer Assault Weekly and was recently asked which platforms I will be building first.
My answer was simple, I’d be focusing on the Windows Phone first, then Apple and finally Android. However, the reason for this, is not because I want to give Windows Phone a fighting chance, I am simply focusing on the Windows platform due to the many tools I currently have at my disposal. Visual Studios and C# are more familiar to me, in comparison to Xcode tools, as a result of the extensive classes I have taken over the aforementioned material. Also, not having a mac at the moment is hindersome; I have, however, begun to build a Gamer Assault Weekly app for the iPhone.
Unfortunately, due to spreading myself across multiple platforms at once, I’ve realized that I’m getting less than what I had hoped done. This is another factor as to why I have chosen to concentrate my attention on Windows first; I can store my app development in the cloud and work from any of my Windows computers that have Visual Studios installed.
The reason why Apple is second is due to how I started before, I have access to the windows phone/windows 8 platform compared to the mac’s app builder. If I had a Mac, I believe the app would be released for the iPhone and iPad much sooner. I really want to bring the full experience to the Apple market; however, Apple underwent a vast UI change and severely hindered my progress of building the app, thus, it was very much back to drawing board.
I know many people were probably thinking why have I saved Android for last? It’s because Android, in my personal opinion, is the most fragmented when compared to the other platforms; in addition, many of my developer friends say it is definitely a pain to program. That is probably the biggest reason why I am leaving it for last, sorry to say Android fans, but there will be some waiting.
I am currently just a one man army right now, building some apps by myself does take some time and requires a lot of patience in testing, learning and more testing. It isn’t something that is easy to do (especially with a full time job) but there will be a Gamer Assault Weekly app coming to every platform and it will be a full-fledged featured app. I can’t say what will be in it but I am very excited to see it released in the near future.