> Also, that it would cost a lot in development time to get something "just right" for the App Store for it to be accepted, whereas with Android you can keep on iterating and pushing changes without having to spent a huge amount of time making everything look perfect, and be absolute minimal in terms of bugs.
This is highly misleading. The App Store review process does delay iteration, and heavily crash apps are rejected but there is no requirement to spend a huge amount of time making things look perfect or absolutely minimal in terms of bugs.
> But aside from all that, this discussion is not really about quality per se. It is about figuring out your business idea, getting it right.
But surely the same logic applies to this too. Why haven't we already seen all kinds of innovative business ideas emerging through the rapid iteration that Android supposedly enables?
This is all predicated on the idea that you being able to release apks easily gets users who care enough too give you valuable feedback that you can use to learn and improve your app faster.
There are more apps on the play store than the iOS store, and apks have always been easy to work with and had this same advantage.
If this advantage has always been present, why aren't the apps already better than iOS apps?
The only reality that is acceptable on HN is that Google is unstoppable and benevolent to geeks. An optimistic view of their competitors counts as shilling.
Everything in play services is most certainly not Application level. I presume you didn't read the linked article or the other comments here about the APIs that are migrating there.