[Cialug] iPhone vs Android

[Theron Conrey]

I'll call BS. Most app devs I know want to solve real problems AND make coin.  Those people know that iOS is less of a moving target.  It moves, just less than android.  It's treated as a stable base to make larger revenue with a single build vs. android with multiple platforms.  There are devs that just want to make coin with crap. The above also explains why they write against iOS primarily as well.

-theron

> On Apr 13, 2015, at 9:00 AM, Josh More <jmore at starmind.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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