A number of articles have recently debated the true cost of developing and deploying Windows Mobile and Android phones. VDC recently completed our survey of the embedded engineering community and here are a few things that our research indicated:
· Android projects are reported as longer.
· Android projects have larger development teams.
· Android and WinMo both have Total Development Costs lower than the average mobile phone project.
· Android and WinMo both attribute a lower percentage of their Total Development Costs to software development than does the average mobile phone project.
· Android projects spend a higher percentage of their software development costs on licensing commercial software and development tools.
· This is the kicker – Although WinMo projects reported a higher percentage of their production costs associated with software components and royalties, Android projects still spent more overall.
So does this mean Android is actually more expensive? Not necessarily.
· Many organizations do not yet have the same level of institutional knowledge and internal software assets built up for Android as might be available for Windows Mobile.
· The costs associated with Android can increase based upon how “Google-centric” the user experience is intended to be in terms of the use of pre-loaded Google applications and branding.
· Also, not all of the Android respondents to our survey were building smartphones. Feature phones and consumer electronic devices were among other application classes targeted.
This debate is of course just a reincarnation or evolution of the Windows vs. Linux battle that has raged in the embedded market for a number of years. More often than not, the relative cost of these solutions is highly organization-dependent, based upon their level of experience with the platform and the specific device’s requirements.
Please let us know if you have any additional questions about our research. More information about our recent engineering survey can be found here.
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