A lot of busy mobile application developers prefer Apple’s iOS operating system, because they can build software in less time and with fewer lines of code than they can with rival Google’s Android OS. But with 86 percent of the world’s smartphones running Android, they’d better warm up to it or forget global usage.

“When you want to bring it to the global market, that’s when you really, really, really need Android,” said Hilary Karls (pictured), senior software engineer at Uber Technologies Inc.

Karls spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco.

The extra time and code that may go into building an Android app could have an upside: Android offers a more open platform that affords developers more choices — for example, “to have better security controls; to have widgets on your homescreen,” Karls said. Android also offers more flexibility in terms of when permissions are required and when they are not. And it beats iOS in notifications, which can be richer with actions, animations, etc. (though IOS is beginning to catch up there), she noted.

UberEATS case study

Karls and three others developed the UberEATS application for Android. Initially called UberFresh, the meal-ordering and delivery platform began as a Los Angeles-based experiment. It has since expanded to more than 120 cities internationally.

As for Android’s slowpoke reputation, Karls’ experience building UberEATS serves as stark contradiction. The group of four behind the app started, tuned and shipped it in about three-and-a-half months.

Cloud also helped spur UberEATS to success. For an app like UberEATS with multiple parties interacting, “bringing everything together in a connected cloud make a lot of sense,” Karls said. “Deliverers don’t really like fragmented application-user interfaces,” she said. Having to talk to five or six different services to get something done creates “overhead of understanding of how to connect to each one,” she said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Samsung Developer Conference.

Photo: SiliconANGLE