Comment by credo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by credo | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a blog post on a related topic last week.

Here is some more relevant data The folks at http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts-tot... say that only 13 Android apps have got more than 50,000 downloads. A greater number of iPhone apps have got more than a million downloads.

This should give you a good indication of two things

(a) which platform successful developers focus on and

(b) how many Android users vote with their wallet to indicate that the Android market has good apps.

Edit: It is interesting to see the downvotes canceling out some of the upvotes :) I understand that some people may not like these numbers, but the commenter/reply suggesting that the numbers are "misleading" (because money-making iPhone apps are older) is mistaken.

Consider the fact that the iPhone Angry Birds app has got more than 4 million downloads in less than 4 months. A paid iPhone app in the #1 slot for a month can get more than a million downloads in that month. Now think about how many downloads a #1 or #10 paid Android app can get in one month.

For those not likely destined for the top 10 and that don't have large investments to recoup, these top 10 statistics are fairly irrelevant. A survey among developers who ported their app to both platforms would be far more enlightening.

For a company that spends a lot on development and marketing, and will likely have a top 10 app, those top 10 numbers may certainly mean that their Android investment won't pay off.

An interesting datapoint is this guy:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/caq8f/iama_developer_w...

Who made the same app for the iPhone and for Android. His ratio was 3:1, which is roughly the ratio of handsets in the US iirc.

I'm not sure why you think the top 10 disparity between iPhone and Android is irrelevant and why that wouldn't have any bearing on the average app's revenue prospects.

In any case, the TechFlash article says "Michael Schneider of HiveBrain Inc., a Seattle-based iPhone app developer who has dabbled in Android apps, said the volume of sales for Android apps has been about one-tenth the size of their iPhone counterparts."

This ratio matches what I've heard from several other people (disclaimer: I know Michael and among other things, we have discussed these topics in the past)

> The folks at http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts-tot.... say that only 13 Android apps have got more than 50,000 downloads

It's important to note that this number counts only paid games. Is it really that few?

I'd love to see a comparison of ad-supported free applications. iPhone will surely win, but nowhere by that margin.

Also, one of the points of the article is that Android allows for more varied apps to be developed. GOTO (as described in the article) cannot exist on the iPhone. Nor can Swype. Nor any of the the home screen replacements.

Indeed about half of the app ideas I have are not possible to implement on non-jailbroken iPhones.

Isn't this kind of misleading? Haven't the iPhone apps been on the market longer and had more time to gain more downloads?

50x less is kind of crazy though. There are nearly enough android devices out there, but you'll make 50x less money if you're an android developer. So an iPhone developer making $100,000 from Apple would only end up making around $2000 from Google... seems a bit scary to invest effort into a platform that won't return value!

has the Android market opened up paid apps outside the U.S. ?

The Market itself is open to lots of countries, but many of these countries don't have support for paid apps yet (only free) which is very frustrating.

What's many? At least in germany it's open for paid apps for a year or more. Didn't think there are still countries.. that's frustrating indeed. At least there are other markets (slideme)

Australia, Denmark, Russia, etc.

Actually I seem to remember that the only countries in Europe who are allowed to play are Germany, France and the UK.

It is being frustrating because it could be fixed tomorrow - the issue is that Google is using its own payment system (google checkout) instead of a real payment system such as paypal.

If you ask me, it borders on what Microsoft did with IE and netscape in the nineteens.

Mhh, according to Wikipedia buying apps is allowed in a lot more countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Market

Maybe, but as a sell that isn't going to do me any damn good.

Is direct comparisons of download numbers the correct measure? The iPhone has nearly three times as much users as of Android and a greater lure of larger returns.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com