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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

Apple cares a lot about market share. Why do you think they keep bragging with statistics every chance they get? Being a leader in market share is very important for developers and it's important for customers, too. Also more market share means more sales - so more money and profit. Why wouldn't they want that? You don't think they cared about their market share with iPods, or their market share in the tablet market?

They may not care about market share at any cost, but they do care about it quite a lot. They may have said they don't care about market share in the old Mac days, but it's not like they could do much about it, so what else could they have said?

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I'm an Android fan, but marketshare between Android and iPhone doesn't tell the whole story, at least for developers. I haven't seen numbers on it in a while, but iOS is much better for devs in terms of making money. iOS users buy more apps, and if you're developing to make money, that's pretty good deciding factor.

Of course, may not want to develop for Apple for other reasons (store policies, not wanting to get randomly rejected, etc), but I'd assume money is the driving factor for many.

Now, that isn't to say that Android won't be making good profits. It's just that Apple has a cash cow with their App Store's 30% cut (and now mandatory payments in app). Actual market share matters less, because that's not necessarily where they're continuing to make money.

     iOS users buy more apps

I own both an iPhone and an Android.

I haven't bought any Android apps because Android apps are crap and I won't pay money for shitty weekend hacks.

     if you're developing to make money, that's pretty 
     good deciding factor

That's a pretty weak argument -- do the math, most apps on iTunes aren't even making up for sunken costs.

Quite the contrary I would say, since the Android Marketplace is filled with crappy apps, you can create value quite easily.

Wow...troll much?

I also own both Android and iOS phones.

and I've also never purchased an app on Android.

So either we're both under the bridge, or you've mis-labeled the troll. (Look in the mirror.)

I've owned 2 different iPod Touches over the past 2-3 years, and I've owned an Android phone for a year and a half. I've bought apps for both platforms.

The plural of anecdote is not data. There are apps worth paying for on Android. But for whatever reason -- maybe it's quality, maybe it's customer sentiment -- iOS users tend to spend more money in the App Store than Android users spend in the Market.

iOS may be more valuable to developers today, but if marketshare keeps developing according to the current trend, there will be an inflection point.

It's widely reported that iOS users are more likely to spend money on apps than Android users. Let's assume that the percentage of users spending money on apps for iOS vs Android is something like 80% vs 40%. For a developer this means, ceteris paribus, there need to be twice as many people on Android to make the same amount of money he would make in the Appstore.

If you look at marketshare trends, Android is slowly getting to the point where you stand to make as much money developing for Android as you would developing for iOS. In fact, if trends hold, there will be more money in Android than in iOS in the long run, making it the logical step for developers to jump ship (or at least develop for both platforms).

This is why market share matters.

Apple cares about market share in two very different ways. Firstly, they care about it for the simple reason of making money on each handset sold. In that respect, those charts actually show Apple crushing every other smartphone manufacturer out there.

Secondly, they care about marketshare of the iOS platform because this is one of the determining factors in how much support a platform will get from developers. Here it could be an issue if the get swamped in volume by the Android platform. But marketshare isn't the only factor that helps developers make the choice to support a platform. Developers care about how much money they can make by developing on a given platform, and this is not determined uniquely by the marketshare. Other factors include discoverability of the developer's application by users, the demographics of the marketplace (are they users that tend to hand over money for a product, or do they prefer free stuff), and ease of development (how good is the SDK, how fragmented is the platform, how restrictive are the T&Cs of the marketplace).

In this second aspect of marketshare, Apple may end up losing out to Android overall. But firstly, that day is not yet come - when talking about platform marketshare, there are also the iPod touch and the iPad to toss into the mix, which changes the final numbers. Even when (and I do think it is a question of when) Android takes over as the leading platform, the factors outlined in the last paragraph mean that it is not an automatic given that developers will flee iOS for Android. Indeed, unless Android can claim more than 80% of the market, I would expect developers will show equal preference for supporting both platforms. We are a long way from 80% marketshare for Android, so I doubt Apple is particularly worried just at the moment.

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