Android Market to overtake App Store in August 2011 | Hacker News Reader

Android Market to overtake App Store in August 2011

mobilebusinessbriefing.com

22 pointsEricssonLabs23 comments

As an iPhone developer, I just don't really care anymore about the size of one app store versus another. It's all about which store you can make real money from. Apple has paid out over $2 billion to developers (data from March 2011) and what has Google paid to Android developers? $50M? $100M? A tiny percentage compared to Apple.

There are so many blog entries at the top of HN about Android developers who made $500/mo from their apps. Guess what? $500/mo is nothing. $500/mo doesn't even pay for rent. If you write an iPhone app that doesn't look like Interface Builder exploded and you don't make at least $500/mo then you're pretty much a miserable failure. I have friends that have built the simplest, most inane iPhone games on a Sunday afternoon that make over $1000/mo.

The successes of iPhone developers absolutely dwarf the articles I've read about Android developers' incomes. I'm not talking about big game development houses either, I'm referring to 1-3 person teams (designer, coder, coder typically) who make tens of thousands of dollars per month. I'm personally friends with at least a dozen people who have apps that make this much. It's not even a surprise anymore when a nice-looking iPhone app makes $50k in its first month.

The reality is that iPhone developers who make decent apps make a lot of money. I don't care if the Android Market is 5x the size of the App Store if Apple is still paying out billions of dollars to developers.

Google only recently made it possible to do in app selling, which I believe will actually make it much, much easier to get money for our games, especially as android users are more willing to buy in game upgrades.

But that is only half the equation the other part being that users can expect to find an app that can solve their problem - which is important for the users to buy an Android phone in the first place (it is also partly why I have written of Win7 phone).

A large issue of the revenue difference is that you can return apps for up to 24 hours on Android but you can't return an iPhone app. Because of this, friends of mine who use Android phones will routinely download an app to use for a specific situation they're currently in, then return later the following day. It's not the app is bad, it's just that they used it for the one thing they wanted to use it for, and can now just get their money back. It's like buying a tux for your wedding and then returning it the next day for a full refund. This may be a huge plus for users, but as a developer it really, really sucks.

The refund window was reduced to 15 minutes a while back. Which IMO as an Android developer is too short; 1 or 2 hours would be better.

As a successful android dev, I want the window gone. If they want to email me for a refund, fine, I'll refund with no questions asked, but letting people play my paid apps while they wait for the doctor to call them in and just getting a refund sucks.

Don't you think those people are cheap enough that they're probably not going to download your app at all if they can't refund it? Isn't that little bit of exposure better than nothing? Maybe if they end up really liking your app, they'll keep it. Can you know how many people who keep your app tried it in the first place because of the refund window?

I can understand your frustration from seeing a lot of refunded apps, but as a user, it can be frustrating to have to pay for every app that I try, without being able to really see if it's up to my standards or solves my problem. Which is why I much preferred the 24 hour window, esp. for apps that you can't really test drive well in 15 minutes.

It really should be configurable by the developer - sometimes a week might make sense, sometimes no redemption might be appropriate.

In app billing won't mean shit unless they can get carrier billing working flawlessly for all OR they can fix the checkout process so if they order and their credit card didn't wor it actually tells them and provides a way to update it on the spot.

The infamous red payment declined message has to go away first.

I don't do in-app selling, so that doesn't apply to me at all.

For some reason, one of my apps makes 90% of its revenue from international sales. I think 50% of that revenue comes from countries which Google's payment engine doesn't support.

Until Google adds payment support to all the countries that Apple supports, Android revenues are going to continue to lag for many developers.

What is interesting is driving force behind so many more developing for Android. What is the cause?

* It is not the profit.

* It is not the user base. Unless your app only appeals to smartphone users, iOS outsells Android by leaps and bounds.

It is, perhaps, an indication that Android is winning in the minds of geeks who go on to write their own software for the platform they use, while the average Joe continues to use iOS and is willing to pay someone else to write the software.

Perhaps, but, the downside, is that free Android apps that make no money don't really pay your bills. Doing apps on the side is one thing, quitting your job and working on Android apps full-time is quite another. I don't see many posts about developers doing the latter.

" iOS outsells Android by leaps and bounds"

No it doesn't.

Source? From what I can gather, Android barely outsells the iPhone alone. The iPad and the iPod touch sell millions more.

At least three people down-voted skidooer's comment; why? What is going on with the vindictive voting around here lately? A lot of down-voters complain about comments not being sufficiently polite and deferential when disagreeing with fellow commenters, but they fail to see that their petty down-voting is arguably just as anti-social and perhaps more damaging to the community.

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/48744.php

"Android Market Share Surpasses Apple's IOS Globally for First Time"

1) This article has nothing to do with Market Share. What they measured was the share of ad impressions for a single ad network (InMobi).

2) This article doesn't even get the OS name right, still referring to it as "iPhone OS" instead of iOS.

3) This doesn't support your argument in response, since it's only measuring iPhone devices, and not other iOS devices like iPod Touch and iPad.

It's been interesting to see the evolution of Apple apologists over the past few years.

At first, when Android was starting out, the general attitude was that "It's cute you're trying to compete with Apple on this one, but the market is already saturated and dominated by the iPhone."

Then when Android quickly eclipsed the iOS market share, the argument quickly shifted to the size of the app store.

With the app store argument soon to become invalid, they scramble on to the next desperate talking point: app sales. This time around conveniently ignoring ad revenue as a portion of developer income.

Can't we just enjoy our respective amazing phones without having to turn every iOS or Android article posted here into a pissing contest? Android's Market is about to be bigger than the app store? Bravo, good for them. Which will be my exact same reaction when Apple announces good iPad 2 sales numbers.

Does anyone buy this analysis? No, not the idea that someday there may be more apps in Google's app store than Apple's, but the drawing straight line projections and marking a circle around the intersection and looking at the date axis and saying "OK, that's the day!"

Shouldn't there maybe be an obligation to think about the data you're analyzing. Like, maybe some of those Android apps represent apps that were available for iOS? Maybe the "researchers" should look into the percentage of Android-only apps and iOS-only apps and try to see in which categories there are growing or shrinking leads for one platform or another?

This "finding" seems more like a typical attention-whoring move. It's like, in 1998, posting a poll asking whether Sun or Microsoft or Yahoo was going to buy Apple. It's designed to gin up outrage and therefore attention. Don't feed the troll.

It's not scientific but I still think it has value. Two different firms have forecasted a month that they believe the Android app store will overtake the Apple app store in numbers. This metric has value and it's what research firms are paid to do.

What is the value of the metric? And what metric? App submissions per unit time? I suppose that metric has some value. The projected date that the Google app store will have more apps than Apple's iOS app store is not a metric: it's a naive extrapolation.

What value do research firms deliver? For whom? In the past, many people have accused various research firms of shilling for various industry players, e.g. Gartner for Microsoft. I've never heard of a research firm providing insightful, actionable, accurate, non-trivial analysis. ("Sun will rise tomorrow!") The only people who I know of who cite research firms' reports are people in large corporations who are out of touch with reality or sales people or people at companies that have an interest in having others believe what a research firm is saying.

Market research can be scientific in that it can reflect a basic intellectual honesty and be the result of critical reflecting on findings and asking whether they make even the least amount of sense.

When people use the term "scientific" the way you did, it often appears to be a defensive move, a way to say, "Of course this isn't a repeatable double-blind controlled clinical trial!" But there's much more to science than that. Most of what we know we know through the application of scientific methods (perhaps better-called habits of mind) in situations where gold-plated studies are impractical or impossible.

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ADDENDUM

I am being harsh because research firms contribute little or no value. They're little better than web content farms in terms of the volume and value of information they produce. They feed pointless speculation. They flatten complex issues into simple-minded horse races. I am far more supportive of people doing real work that turns out to be spectacularly wrong. Research firms produce thick, black, sooty smoke that pollutes the marketplace, both the literal marketplace and the marketplace of ideas.

"attention-whoring", "troll", "naive", etc. Why are you getting so offensive about this article?

I agree that this metric has little value. Quality of apps, average sales per app and exclusives are all more important. However, this is still a metric used by marketing and I believe some consumers do care about "the biggest app store". I think Apple has used app numbers in various commercials.

This article doesn't conclude which app store is better (and actually says smaller is better for sales). It is simply stating that based on the current trends, Android will have more apps.

Speaking as an iOS developer who has switched to Android (because of client contract demand), Android lacks the Wow app. The app like the visual AR translation app (which despite its flaws). Or The Elements iPad app.

Android lacks exclusive, luxury-type apps. It, for lack of a better phrase, lacks snobs.

Snobs mean more for a market and the developers that pursue them, than sheer numbers.

What specifically in the Android Market will overtake the iOS App Store?

- The fake-licensed 'Spiderman' and Wolverine clone games with the same graphics and massively slow Quake engine port? The fake Rolex watch widgets? The fake Citizen watch widgets? Various other 'same code, different graphics' spamware apps?

- John's maze test? Other games that lack actual scoring or gameplay, but are more tech demos?

- The great games that have ads plastered all over their Android versions, like Angry Birds, as the developers think users are cheap and don't bother providing a paid version.

Massive ghetto is massive. That's not an achievement.

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