Google give much less hassle than iTunes.
Beta testing is much easier in Google Play.
Eclipse and NDK are evil.
Anyway pluses and minuses.
HTTPRequest and all other HTTP functions work really well in Android. I've had some issues in iOS where if I reuse a connection ID it will sometimes still store the previous response even if that response has been accessed and a new request has been sent. Sending a file for iOS works fine as long as you don't have the PHP scripts in a protected directory.
In App server verification - not sure what you mean by this, my app has credentials that are checked against our server.
AdMob in AppGameKit works fine, you can't scale the ad and are limited to banners, but it's ok. Probably wouldn't be too hard to modify it for other ad sizes, but I only tried once by changing the ad type flag and it didn't work so I gave up as it wasn't that important. Would be cool if we could do something like Temple Run does though where the add has an animation transition.
Unique ID for every device. What I do for this is use GetDeviceName and add a random integer to it, that gets stored in my user's credential file and on the server. There's issues with that though because if they uninstall the app or clear it's cache then the server gets a new unique device id... Would be great if we could get something truly unique to the device.
Facebook in AppGameKit works pretty well, I've had a few instances where I'd have to sign in to FB even though the device is already signed in. Probably something to do with us using older Facebook SDK, not a big deal. Friendslist stuff works great, post to wall works nicely, would be nice to be able to send an invite like other apps, but I think post to wall might be a better attention grabber.
Receipt verification will be difficult. When a purchase is made I have the app generate a receipt string that is sent to the server and all of my scripts that add a balance to the user's account requires their credentials. Unfortunately, AppGameKit doesn't have commands to retrieve the receipt string after the purchase is made, but this might give you some clues on verification:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17143807/how-can-i-verify-google-play-in-app-purchase-in-php
If you do set up a nice IAP verification using PHP please share it with me, I'd love to secure our purchases a little better.
