

Android Tablets: Hardware and OS are Getting Better, but Apps are Still MIA - fredericl
http://newsgrange.com/android-tablets-hardware-is-great-os-is-getting-better-but-apps-are-still-mia/

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dpcan
Android devs are keeping their financial figures close to the vest I believe,
which results in a lot of people thinking there's no money to be made on
Android.

It's smart. When the iPhone's App Store launched people were spilling their
guts. Stories left and right of millions being made out of the gate. Land rush
on!

This time around, indie devs realized that if they keep their mouths shut
about their successes, the competition will take much longer to get there.

I will say that I've done very well in the Android Market. It's been an
exciting year, but every week there's new competition, there's more apps to
choose from, and my income is getting much harder to maintain. I'm making
about 2/3 as much as I was just back in January, and 1/2 of what I was back in
October.

I'm creating updates and new apps in hopes of staying the course even as I
imagine the landscape is going to change drastically.

~~~
jdq
I realize you are talking about Android phone apps, but maybe what Android
tablet apps need is a few devs bragging about the money they are making to
attract more tablet app developers. Having less than 100 apps (last figure I
heard) doesn't help to sell more tablets.

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vladikoff
Just got an Android tablet at Google I/O, starting with development ASAP.
Developing for Android 3.0 is impossible without hardware, the emulator is
really really slow.

There will be more tablet apps when there's more hardware choice and
availability.

~~~
dazzla
I held off buying an android tablet and doing any development for one leading
up to google i/o. Now I have the hardware and knowlege to get started so will
work on a tablet version of my app soon. However its still not my top priority
as I don't feel the demand is there yet. No users have asked for it like they
did for an iPad version.

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nextparadigms
With Samsung and Amazon joining the market in the next few months, it could be
a huge opportunity for developers to take advantage of this market since there
won't be any competition. Virtually all Android tablet users will try your
application.

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ctdonath
John Carmack (id Software, Doom, Quake, Rage, etc.) was asked if he will
develop games for Android. He asked the audience how many people had spent
more than $20 on apps. No hands. 'nuff said.

~~~
kenjackson
But Angry Birds is making $1M/month on Android with ads. That's not a bad
revenue stream. And you can do an ad-free version for $1.

~~~
programminggeek
Angry Birds made a lot more than that on iOS before it ever went to Android.
Name an Angry Birds like success story that _started_ on Android. All the big
apps _start_ on iOS and are ported to Android later.

~~~
kenjackson
iOS had a pretty big headstart. Read Scoble's recent post on some hot Android
apps [1]. They're just now beginning to do high quality apps first on Android.
Momentum has started to shift. It won't happen instantly, but it does appear
to be happening.

[1][http://scobleizer.com/2011/05/09/what-i-learned-by-
interview...](http://scobleizer.com/2011/05/09/what-i-learned-by-
interviewing-23-startups-in-past-few-weeks/)

The money quote:

"But the most interesting set of companies is being built around smartphones
and here, for the first time, Apple’s iOS doesn’t have the coolest apps. For
instance, Innobell lets you add social apps to a phone call. Only on Android
today. TekTrak gives you really great security. But mostly on Android today.
And WalkBase lets you track your phone’s movement through wifi and assisted
GPS patterns in the room. Again, only on Android because Apple and Microsoft
don’t let WalkBase talk to the radios the way Android does."

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asymptotic
A few days ago I tried to run Android Honeycomb in an emulator on my quad-core
12GB RAM box, and it's completely, 100% unusable, even after increasing the
device RAM to 1GB. Google admits their emulator is completely unusable:

[http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/01/27/android-team-
acknowl...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/01/27/android-team-acknowledges-
honeycomb-emulator-performance-problems-hard-at-work-on-fixes/)

Android tablets are only going on sale on Amazon.co.uk start of June. Want to
know why I'm unable to make tablet apps? This.

Ask yourself a question - how did a unusable emulator manage to make it past
the Android team's QA process? If that's how incompetent they are...well, I'm
shaking my head.

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surfingdino
Android is fine for apps that are rich clients communicating with servers. For
games, Android is a piece of shit. A close friend of mine sums it up best when
he says, 'I make 30x as much money on iOS games and have 30x support tickets
on Android.' Nuff said.

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darrenkopp
Personally, I'm waiting for the galaxy tab 10.1. I wasn't a fan of the Xoom
price tag, so I didn't get one. Once I get a honeycomb tablet, then I'll begin
writing apps for it.

~~~
surfingdino
I wish Google would sell their reference hardware to developers via their
developer store. They are much more keen on giving the hardware to journalists
than selling it to developers. And then they wonder why there are no apps? I
have to answer support questions from the people who got that f...ing tablet
for free during Google IO, but Google won't sell me one. How stupid is that?

------
programminggeek
Ok, having sold apps on both Android and iOS platforms I can tell you with
100% certainty that the same app will have sales that are an order of
magnitude larger on iOS than they will on Android. Android users don't like
paying for things as much as iPhone users do.

Yes, Angry Birds makes a lot with ads, but they still made more on iOS. I
think they had made something like $10 million on iOS before they made $1 on
Android.

So, yeah go and do Android dev, but you will easily make 5-10x as many sales
with the same app on the iTunes app store. Build and app for both and try it.

Also, if your app doesn't suck you can make way more selling the app than
giving it away. I tested ads and they don't make nearly as much as paid
downloads do. Now, I didn't have a top 100 app, so maybe if you have a big hit
ad-supported stuff is good money, but if you have a top 100 app you should be
making great money either way.

I think the one place where there is a good chance of making money in Android
land is to do android specific features that the OS should have had in the
first place. Like, better UI/widget stuff, better keyboards, and so on. Things
that can only be done on android.

