As a reference point, I use Ipad mini 4 and know of 2 others doing the same with GP.
It is a slick and smooth as you would expect. In 3 years linking to the panel via Flightsteam has been seamless.
One pilot I know runs SD and GP live at the same time on the same Ipad mini 4 and flicks between them in flight (I don’t work for GP or sell it, just wanted to provide a cross-check)
Regards.
Lucius wrote:
If Garmin would drop Android and focus on iOS, perhaps Garmin would stand a chance compared to ForeFlight.
Was at a garmin seminar last fall, acc to their stats iOS represents 96% of their GP installs.
iOS receives all the love, Android gets updates when they find time. They have not dropped support altogether, but it’s darn close.
Arne wrote:
Was at a garmin seminar last fall, acc to their stats iOS represents 96% of their GP installs.
iOS receives all the love, Android gets updates when they find time. They have not dropped support altogether, but it’s darn close.
It is probably a self-reinforcing loop :-(
acc to their stats iOS represents 96% of their GP installs.
Easily the case where they sell 99% of their products: the US 
The GA scene there is almost 100% IOS, partly because Apple are there and “own the world of style”, android is the “poor man’s OS in most of the world”, most pilots there have plenty of money, and since app devs write mostly for IOS, you get a full circle.
In Europe, there is much less wealth in GA, many/most renters will not fly at all unless they can cost-share, and android products are popular – as they are in poor countries.
The only genuine reason for IOS is that Apple continued the CPU performance development of tablets, while android tablets have for a long time stagnated (curiously, since android phones are just as powerful as IOS ones, at any given price point) so coding for android needs more skill, and there will always be more coders who have less skill
Peter wrote:
Getting back to GA my preference would be for a “flying tablet” to be dedicated to flying, so that I don’t turn up to fly one day and find it’s been trashed, perhaps by some OS update I did which broke something, which can’t be fixed in the 15 mins before my filed EOBT.
Wouldn’t that exactly be what Garmin calls “Area 760”?
Peter wrote:
The only genuine reason for IOS is that Apple continued the CPU performance development of tablets, while android tablets have for a long time stagnated (curiously, since android phones are just as powerful as IOS ones, at any given price point) so coding for android needs more skill, and there will always be more coders who have less skill
Having been in this industry my experience is that the “genuine reason for IOS” is completely different.
The Apple ecosystem feels like heaven from a developers point of view with very few devices and a very strict product lifecycle management by apple. You do not need to have more than 20 devices to test on to do a 100% test on all devices that currently run IOS – but you don’t need to as the devices are extremely similar so that realistically your test rig is no more than 5 devices (different screen sizes and oldest iPad model still within lifecycle).
Developing, esp. testing for Android is a nightmare. Many developers say “there is no such thing as Android” as every handset manufacturer has its own variants (including adjustments very deep in the core) that are impossible to test for. In addition to that, none of the manufacturers has a clear lifecycle management, sunsetting devices after a couple of years.
When you develop Android apps you can be sure that your customer support (if you offer one) is swamped with request like “I tried to install it on a 2011 Motorola Xoom that I hand-patched to Lollipop some years ago using a package I found on the net and now the screen goes dark when I try to connect to the FS510 – tell me what to do immediately!”
You are saying the same thing as I was: you need more skill to code for android – because you need to use the correct subset of the API to cover the range of devices in current use, all the way back to v4.
This takes a lot of programming experience. A 20 year old won’t have it.
The proof of this is in the apps which do actually work properly. It can be done.
Peter wrote:
You are saying the same thing as I was: you need more skill to code for android
I’m not really – in professional software development the majority of the work is often not coding but testing and validation. Even if you have the most talented and experienced coder of all times, the testing and validation effort for Android is still many orders of magnitude higher than that for IOS. And no: A good coder does not replace proper testing…
Peter wrote:
You are saying the same thing as I was: you need more skill to code for android
It’s not a question of skill, it’s a question of having to adopt to a very large and largely unpredictable set of environments.
professional software development
I’ve been doing " professional software development " for 40+ years, so I know how it works I am up to my neck in C, before posting this, and after posting this.
It’s a matter of how much you want to pay for programmers, and testing. A company decides how much effort and money a product is worth, and does it, or not.
Most people writing “apps” today are woefully inexperienced. I get probably five proposals per day to “write an app for EuroGA”
Is Garmin Pilot still being updated?
Garmin Pilot is being updated approx every three months with enhancements and bug fixes see App Store
