[Cialug] iPhone vs Android

[Josh More]

App developers come in two flavours - those that want to solve real
problems and those that use the easy tools to collect a paycheck. The
latter have been targeted by Apple with a campaign focused on
promoting graphic artists into "developers".

So, in the former case, you have people who are highly skilled and
expensive, creating apps that don't look very good and often fail
based on the wide range of devices out there. In the latter, you get
cheap apps that look great and work reliably (usually) on a class of
device.

At the business level, an Android solution requires investing a lot of
cash up front to pay for the good devs AND investing in a support
infrastructure since there's no way to test an app on all available
devices so you have to deal with the constant "my four year old device
won't run your app!" complaints. If you go with IOS, you pay once and
get a piece of crap that works OK on most devices and your support
staff is a single person whose job is saying "we don't support the
iPhone4, you have to upgrade".

All told, it's a good business decision, even if we don't like it.

-Josh

On Sun, Apr 12, 2015 at 2:49 PM, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> It has long boggled my mind why it seems so common for some organization to
> produce a phone app for iPhone but not Android. Close to home, the biggest
> offender is the Des Moines Register. They made an app for iOS for RAGBRAI,
> but not for Android, and the same for a new "things to do in Des Moines"
> app. They promised an Android version Real Soon Now, but we're still
> waiting.
>
> What is so hard about making an app for Android? You'd think the least they
> could do is write the thing in HTML5 and show a mobile website on both
> platforms.
>
> Android phones clearly outnumber iPhones in the U.S. and worldwide, and
> it's not like Des Moines Register's audience (or the audience of any of the
> other apps I've seen do this) are iPhone heavy. Why would a company limit
> themselves by deliberately rolling out to a smaller audience and then
> waiting years to go to Android? (Or never going, for some of them.)
>
> I thought it might be that iPhone is where the money is. But there's info
> on that here:
>
> https://medium.com/its-an-app-world/march-2015-iphone-vs-android-monetization-capabilities-you-won-t-believe-who-won-7a02fde2dc2
>
> # of phones worldwide:
> iPhone: 600,000,000
> Android: 1,700,000,000
>
> Yearly Downloads:
> iPhone: 22,000,000,000
> Android: 51,000,000,000
>
> In App Purchase Revenue:
> iPhone: $10,000,000,000
> Android: $6,000,000,000
>
> In App Ad Impressions:
> iPhone: 580,000,000,000
> Android: 1,210,000,000,000
>
> Ad Revenue:
> iPhone: $3,300,000,000
> Android: $4,500,000,000
>
> That doesn't look like a clear case for iPhone being the money maker,
> especially in the case of the Register, being driven by ads.
>
> Anyone have any insight? What's so special about iPhone that so many people
> choose to distribute there, and not on Android?
>
> --
> Todd
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