
Developers Are Still Building For Apple’s iOS Over Android By A Factor Of 2-to-1 - jamesjyu
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/07/yep-developers-are-still-building-for-apples-ios-over-android-by-a-factor-of-2-to-1/
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shimfish
I am increasingly surprised that anyone bothers to make Android apps.

I have a successful kids app on iOS that I recently ported to Android. The
Android version made 5% of what the iOS version made last month.

If rankings are anything to go by then virtually nobody can be making money
from paid Android apps. During its first week, my app peaked at 50 sales in
one day on the Amazon app store. That put it at #120 of _ALL PAID APPS_ and #3
in kids apps just under some Dora app. The app is now idling around #400 of
all paid apps with around 10 sales a day. By way of comparison, I need to sell
around 100 copies a day to break into the top 400 of all paid apps in the US
on just the iPad rankings.

So, from a purely financial perspective, why are people writing Android apps?

~~~
dannyr
So based on 1 data (from your own app), your conclusion is that it is not
worth building apps on Android in spite of more than a 100 million devices out
there.

Is it possible there are already established apps on Android in your category?

Do you think it would be different if you actually ported your app at least a
year ago?

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myko
I think the problem is that this application was released solely on the Amazon
App Store whereas most Android users are purchasing from Google Play.

edit: apparently this is not the case, though the OP didn't make that clear
initially

~~~
shimfish
The app is on Google Play also. It sells more on the Amazon store.

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vibrunazo
I don't see anywhere in the original flurry report, what is the number of ios
and Android apps using their service. Shouldn't this relevant information be
clear somewhere? What if there are just more.people who chose to use flurry
for ios? I'm an Android dev and haven't even heard of them before.

~~~
uwemaurer
Flurry is very popular also on Android. About 6.5% of all apps, and 28% of the
top 500 Android apps use it. See here for more details:
<http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev>

~~~
vibrunazo
But how exactly does that compare to their ios popularity? Without knowing
that, we are comparing apples to oranges.

~~~
uwemaurer
Yes. The AppBrain report is for Android only, however it shows that Flurry is
widely used in Android apps.

~~~
mtgx
I'm not sure I'd consider 6.5% "widely used". How many use Google Analytics?

~~~
uwemaurer
Google Analytics is in 6.9% of Android apps. For an Android library this means
it is quite widely used, since there are only two more popular libraries.
(Admob SDK (34%) and the Facebook SDK (7.5%))

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sp332
In other news, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace hit 100,000 app submissions faster
than Android's Play, and a bit slower than Apple's App Store.
[http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/news/item/14960_100000_apps_...](http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/news/item/14960_100000_apps_published_to_Windo.php)

~~~
ianbishop
I think Microsoft took a really interesting strategy for enticing developers
to come develop for the platform. Rather than hold a $1M prize competition (a
la Android), they went in a similar direction to the offerings that RIM used
for the playbook.

Instead of just giving away a device though, Microsoft really gamified the
experience by offering several different prizes (including pre-paid credit
cards) and tiers based on the number of apps developed. I think this really
helped draw the college crowd in.

They also approached individual companies who have successful applications on
other platforms and offered to pay them large good amounts of money to develop
for the platform.

It seems like throwing all that money around really did work out for them in
the end :).

~~~
mtgx
Google could've really used a similar approach for tablet apps. I find
Google's lack of attention towards Android tablet apps very frustrating. It's
one of the main reasons, if not _the_ main reason why Android tablets are
generally still not considered very good competitors to the iPad. And if the
situation really is better than we think its, then they are doing a very poor
job at promoting it. This, plus the botched launch of Honeycomb and the
expensive tablets running it, really hurt the momentum for Android tablets,
and they are still suffering for it.

Google needs to learn how to do launches properly, and they should keep in
mind that developer support from day one is extremely important. Apple had
like 2000 apps for the iPad in the first days or weeks after launch, because
they announced the tablet 2 months ahead, and made the SDK available right
away, too. And made the iPhone developers very excited about porting their
apps to the iPad. In contrast, Google released the SDK like literally a day
before the Motorola Xoom launched (which cost $800 at launch - another
extremely dumb move. Asus Transformer was $400 a few months later, and a
better device, too), and then everyone started talking about the lack of
tablet apps on Honeycomb. Would it have killed them to get the developer
support _before_ launch, like Apple? I get really frustrated when I see Google
making obvious mistake after obvious mistake like this.

~~~
ben1040
I sold my Galaxy Tab 10.1 to buy an iPad 3 when they came out, mainly because
of the lack of tablet-optimized apps. 9 months into owning it the app
situation wasn't any better than on day one, and I gave up.

At least as of mid-March, Google didn't even have a tablet-optimized version
of the Google+ app. It was still just a stretched version of the phone view,
just like most every other Android app on a tablet would look.

If G+ is supposedly the hub of Google's product strategy going forward, and G+
doesn't have a good experience on tablets, it makes me wonder if they really
even care at all about the tablet platform at all.

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bookwormAT
looking at the actual announcement from flurry.com, it seems that the company
does not have any data indicating what platforms developers build Apps for.

They just know how popular their own SDK is on both platforms.

There are many reasons of course why flurry could be more popular on iOS than
on Android: What SDK was available first? how is it advertised? how well does
the competition do?

On Android, flurry competes with Google Analytics, which Google advertises in
the Android documentation, developer blog and support pages.

Similar misleading is when they write about "Fragmentation". They list a long
list of different devices that their customer's apps are running on. But they
have no idea if developers run into any issues when supporting these many
devices. How is it fragmentation if you can target many devices and operating
systems with a single code base? Isn't this more like the opposite of
fragmentation?

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chrisrhoden
There's so much FUD in this article it's blinding.

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ma2xd
HTML5 <3

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huggyface
There is no doubt that iOS is more lucrative than Android for many classes of
apps, but come on: who takes these Flurry reports seriously?

Flurry pimps an analytics tool that is very popular on iOS, less popular on
Android. Their intrinsic bias towards iOS, reflecting this, is amply evident
by the narrative they add every time they release these trolling "studies" of
laughable methodology (100% of the women married to me think I'm the best,
therefore 100% of women think I'm the best) -- their disdain for Android, and
pandering to iOS, could not be more evident.

Let's just look at the gross numbers -- if 4x more developers are building for
iOS, based upon Flurry being implemented in apps, then the iOS App Store will
be growing by 4x the pace. Is that true? I'll let the reader discern, but add
the subtle hint that...ha ha...no, not even close.

~~~
bookwormAT
"who takes these Flurry reports seriously?"

The sad answer is (according to techmeme):

MacRumors, Marketing Land, The Next Web, 9to5Google, 9to5Mac, Business
Insider, TechCrunch, PadGadget, IntoMobile, Appolicious Advisor, Pulse2
Technology and Social Media News, memeburn, Gruber, Siegler.

