[MonoTouch] Porting from MonoTouch -> Android (Our experience)

[Ian Vink]

So far we've ported about 60% of our MonoTouch apps to Android (
http://BibleStudyPro.com/iphone and http://BahaiResearch.com is where you
can see some of them, we write apps for the World's various religions)

Revenue:
On average Android is 1/3 to 1/2 of our iPhone daily sales, but growing.

Effort:
Not bad. Android is written in Java so very close to the C# in MonoTouch.
The IDE used "Eclipse" is slightly better than Mono's. All the dev software
is free.
I would guess that you have to write about 20% more lines of code, mostly
because there is no LINQ and very little syntax-sugar.
Our SQLite Databases can be used in both MonoTouch and Android.

Android Market:
Our apps are published instantly when we upload to the Market and sales
are reported in real time. We often publish, get a cup of coffee, then come
back to our first sale in Google Checkout. Must resist the urge to check
sales all the time....
There is no Google "iTunes" so you have to direct users to enter a keyword
into their Market app on their phone. This has not been a barrier at all for
us.

MonoDroid:
Hmm. Not sure if we'll use it if it is not included in the MonoTouch
license. Java is so very close to C# anyways. Obj-C we found too foreign and
we had libraries from C# projects we wished to use so the $399 was worth it
for us.

Summary:
You stand to probably make good money if you port your apps to Android and
include links to it beside your iPhone app links on your web page. There are
more iPhone users out there, but monthly sales of Android have been on par
with iPhone sales for months now so the writing is on the wall...

Hope that helps,
Ian Vink
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