I would personally prefer if they would dedicate the ressources of the Android team to the IOS development and expedite the development of the missing EU features … It simply doesn‘t make sense to develop the App twice for a relatively small market and this is not the place for religious OS disputes. Competition in this area slows it down instead of expediting it.
Just my 2 cents …
I don’t think it is “religious” to just take a marketing view / do some market research. Then you discover that a lot, possibly most, VFR GA in Europe flies with android tablets – because they can be found for a lot less money than IOS ones.
And which products dominate the European VFR market? SD and EVFR hold most of it. Both come on both android and IOS. Yes I know that spec for spec the tablets are similarly priced but you don’t need a top spec to run these products, which is why so many people use cheap android tablets…
So it depends on what market you want to attack. If you want to really make an impact then you must support android. All the time you don’t, even if Garmin gave away GP for nothing, a large chunk of the competition will be impregnable and will just be laughing at you.
OTOH one might argue that the pilots flying with android are cheapskates who will never buy GP (or FF) so no point in worrying about them. That argument however gets close to arguing that decent market penetration will never be achieved in Europe, so may as well give up on it.
In the US it is different and IOS dominates the GA sphere at all levels, and that probably drives both Garmin Pilot and Foreflight.
Is there an android version of GP at all? Last time this came up, you could not download it from the appstore in Europe, and any .apk files that were floating around were old versions. Has this changed?
I have Garmin Pilot on my S8 so yes, there is an Android version in the play store.
Peter wrote:
Then you discover that a lot, possibly most, VFR GA in Europe flies with android tablets – because they can be found for a lot less money than IOS ones.
I very much doubt this.
JasonC wrote:
I very much doubt this.
Well, SkyDemon runs very well on Androids… Incidentally, so does ADL Connect. Unfortunately there is no support for Jeppesen plates on Android — that’s really the only reason I see to use an iPad.
But “most”?
I fly with a lot of pilots and 95% use iPad (for whatever reason.)
What is the functionality difference between GP android and GP IOS?
I found this comparison on a US blog, dated Jan 2019
A_A suggests that Jepp terminal chart integration is not provided on android and the above confirms that. I recall reading this several years ago. But Jepp terminal charts are so expensive that they ar unlikely to feature much in any community that buys a tablet because it costs less than another one 
It still costs some €900/year for the single device sub for “political Europe”.
Anyway, a search with
“garmin pilot” AND android
finds that it’s all been done before, though perhaps not in the last year or so.
Peter wrote:
A_A suggests that Jepp terminal chart integration is not provided on android. I recall reading this several years ago. But Jepp terminal charts are so expensive that they ar unlikely to feature much in any community that buys a tablet because it costs less than another one
Probably true. My preference for Android over iOS has nothing to do with the cost of the tablets. I’m used to Android and I dislike Apple’s closed world app policy. But I’ve resigned to the fact there is a much broader selection of flight related apps for iOS so in the end I got myself an iPad mini.
My preference for Android over iOS has nothing to do with the cost of the tablets.
Yes indeed; lots of people prefer android for reasons other than cost and I am one of them.
We did this one too before but I think Jepp avoid android because it makes it dead easy to bootleg the apps. Jepp detect rooting and stop the app running, but under android you can circumvent that too nowadays (it was implemented to enable google pay to run on rooted devices).
NOTE: the above table is for the GP app downloaded from a US app shop user. It may not be the same app made available to a European user.
