Android performance VS IOS

I’m sure this question has been asked many many times, and I’ve done hours of searching but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

I’m currently developing a tower defense game for Android. It’s pretty intensive and not simple, as a result I’ve concluded that the Android device needs to be a minimum of 1.2GHz dual core with 1gb of ram.

I’ve ran the app on my Droid x2 which is a 1gh dual core with 512mb of ram and it runs ok. It lags a bit but is possible to play.

I use my Samsung Galaxy s3 as my main phone for development and its a 1.3GHz dual core with 2gb of ram and it runs my app like a champ. It sometimes lags (Gets around 10FPS for a few seconds) but majority of the time it’s at 25-45 FPS.

With that being said I know what the “specs” required for Android are. The issue I’m having is I can’t test my app on any iDevices because I haven’t paid the $100 developer fee and quite frankly I don’t want to pay it just to find out IOS can’t handle my game due to its complexity.

Does anyone have any experience with this? If Android requires a dual core is IOS more efficient in that it doesn’t require a dual core? Or is it the opposite, IOS requires better hardware specs? Information like this is what I’m looking for.

If anyone is willing to share their personal experiences I’d love to hear them.

Thank you for reading.

The S3 is a rough hardware equivalent to the iPhone 5. That Droid X2 is using the Tegra 2 chipset which I think is slightly less powerful then the A5 chip you’ll find in the current ipod / iphone 4S. All apple processors after the A4 (iphone 4) are dual core chips btw.

In my experience apple’s devices tend to perform slightly better then android devices generally considered to be “in the same class”. I can’t confidently say exactly why that is (they do their own in house processor design, could be that. Software is different, could be that. There’s lots of differences. For example Android does all it’s DVFS (CPU frequency scaling) in software, Apple’s chips do this in hardware, that alone can make a difference in “on demand performance”.