
All those people with cheap Android smartphones have finally started buying apps - jamesbritt
http://qz.com/114601/all-those-people-with-cheap-android-smartphones-have-finally-started-buying-apps/
======
pseudometa
Spin spin spin... where it stops nobody knows.

Same data used in an article yesterday.
[http://www.macrumors.com/2013/08/12/apples-app-store-
still-n...](http://www.macrumors.com/2013/08/12/apples-app-store-still-number-
one-in-revenue-despite-google-play-growth/)

------
jacobbudin
This is an apples to orchards comparison and a very misleading title. The
Google Play Store includes purchases of movies, TV shows, books, magazines,
etc. You can compare it to the iTunes Store in its entirety, but certainly not
to the "Apple App Store".

------
Zigurd
There are, still, far more experienced iOS developers than there are Android
developers. Some people think the learning curve and development effort are
steeper and higher for Android. I'm inclined to believe them if only because I
think Android is a more expressive app environment, and it takes longer to
learn, more effort to design, and longer to implement apps that take full
advantage of Android. It's just going to happen more slowly than the iOS app
market.

I think there are going to be waves or generations of Android software. We are
about at the end of the "porting wave" and we'll next have a wave of apps that
really digs in to the modularity, IPC, background processing, and RPC
technologies available in Android. Facebook was an ambitious first try at a
suite of cooperating apps, and I expect more successful attempts to follow.

~~~
argonaut
I completely disagree about the learning curve. In my experience, the iOS
frameworks are quite complex and multi-layered (i.e. CoreData). Furthermore,
you run into the fact that you have to learn Objective-C. The abundance of iOS
experts probably has more to do with the fact that many Mac OSX developers
easily transferred their skills to iOS development. With the Android platform,
however many more developers know Java already, so that is less of a hurdle
for your average dev.

In my anecdotal experience, for example, more college students try to do
Android development, since they already know Java (taught in most college CS
classes), whereas the students that try iOS development only do so because of
the cachet of having an iPhone app.

~~~
eddieroger
Core Data has to be the single-most difficult framework Apple offers (From
their own documentation: "Core Data is not an entry-level technology.[0]"), so
it makes a poor "ObjC is hard" starting point. Other than the message syntax,
Objective-C is no harder to learn than any other language of it's type.
Frankly, I think Android is needlessly complex, give that nearly ever app
needs some combination of Activities, Receivers, Providers, etc, not to
mention it's take on threading.

0\.
[http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/DataMan...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/DataManagement/Conceptual/iPhoneCoreData01/Introduction/Introduction.html)

~~~
argonaut
I did not cite Core Data when I argued that Obj-C is a hurdle. I cited Core
Data as an example of the fact that iOS frameworks are complex. I also didn't
claim that Objective-C is hard to learn. Merely that it presents a hurdle in a
way that Java does not - any given developer is more likely to know Java than
Obj-C, Java is more widely used and is general purpose language for a
breathtaking variety of applications, whereas Objective-C is pretty much only
used to Mac OSX apps and iOS apps.

------
unknownian
Android is catching up really fast. The things you can do with it and some of
the design choices can be quite clever. For example, the new Gmail app has
pull-to-refresh, but they didn't want to look like a direct rip of
lorenb/Twitter so they redesigned the visual concept completely.

~~~
chenglou
It's not that refreshing. There are dozen of different pull to refresh
animations across OSes. Check out Path's droplet, Facebook's simpler allow,
Mailbox's no spinner at all (just an indication on the status bar), etc.

------
epoxyhockey
For those wondering, I believe that Google Play in China does not support
purchases, thus their absence from this article.

~~~
justincormack
I don't think most Chinese Android phones ship with Google Play, or any of the
other Google apps.

~~~
GFischer
The cheap "generic/no brand" ones don't, but the Huawei and ZTE ones do, and
both companies are on track to be bigger than Samsung - Huawei made 35 billion
last year, compared to Samsung Electronics' 52 billion. ZTE is smaller at 15
billion.

Speaking of Android phones, see for example the Huawei Ascend p6, not yet
Samsung Galaxy S4 territory but it's getting closer:

[http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_ascend_p6-5467.php](http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_ascend_p6-5467.php)

Edit: for completeness, a ZTE high-end phone, not yet as polished as Huawei's
I think. Sold as "Sprint Vital" in the U.S.

[http://www.gsmarena.com/zte_vital_n9810-5511.php](http://www.gsmarena.com/zte_vital_n9810-5511.php)

~~~
wyz9
I’m more interested in trying something from those small Chinese brands than
Huawei personally.

------
cstrat
I am really surprised that Australia drives more revenue than Germany, Canada
or France. All have much greater populations and all are similarly wealthy
nations.

However language probably is a factor...

~~~
querulous
Germany has 46 million english speakers. Canada and France have over 25
million. Australia has 17 million.

