iPhones, Android & everything in between

iPhones, Android & everything in between

Just had the strangest exchange with a developer friend this week-end, very strangely proud of never touching an iPhone, putting the blame on his work not working on those on Apple and proud to say no one on his team owned or touched an iPhone.

Working in the product and design field for years, this kind of behaviour baffles me. There's always a joke divide with "designers are on iPhone, developers are on Android", but for some time I thought that it was all that was : a joke. Unfortunately as years went by I realise some kind of idolisation going on with those becoming some kind of statements.

It always goes over my head how people feel a need to defend multi-billion corporations and how each "side" seem to think they're on some kind of "good side" of an imaginary war. It frightens me when I see how things are pushed into productions without testing on a big portion of the population (also thinking that high-end developers Android phone depicts an accurate representation is ... kinda naive?).

I almost had to fight to put iPhones in the hands of engineers and ask them to test their features on those too before going live, even had to fight with a Product Manager so they "allocated time to do so" (the alternative being launching a totally untested feature which would impact 47% of our flow but yeah...).

I remember having 5 browsers installed on my machine to test a single website I was working on (and 2 virtual machines), I just can't understand how nowadays it seems ok for people to launch things with a "it works on my phone" mentality.

Neither Google or Apple are your "friends", there's no war going on. What there's however is a wide range of users with wide diversity of devices whom need to access your product and applications. Thinking you're a white knight for using one or the other device and ignoring a wide range of the population is beyond stupid, it's also suicidal on a business point of view.