Audience Engagement Digital Innovation
1 min read

Is Android the future of mobile journalism?

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Elizabeth Mearns, BBC, explains how professionals outside Europe and the US are choosing to use Android devices. Is it time people got out of their iOS bubble?

With higher-quality apps and a larger developer base, iOS is undoubtedly the favourite operating system for mobile journalists (mojos) in the Western world.

As Eliot Fitzroy, founder of Epic Tutorials, explained at Mojocon last week, broadcast-quality content can indeed be produced on both Android and iOS, but the fragmentation of Android – the hundreds of different versions running on thousands of different devices – has made it much more difficult for developers to work with this operating system.

Apple, on the other hand, presents a much more appealing space for them. It brings in more revenue, a larger part of its user-base keeps up-to-date with downloading the latest system updates, and they can even take advantage of Swift, Apple’s own popular coding language which has been successful at attracting young coders into the space.

As a result, mobile journalists in Europe and the US have found that iOS will allow them to push the limits with what they can do on one device, without their creativity being limited by buggy apps or complicated workflows.

However, Elizabeth Mearns, senior broadcast journalist, BBC Mobile and Innovations, explained that we are living in an “iOS bubble” which is soon to be popped.

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