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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

Gutted this isn't on Android. Why are so many people still launching apps/competitions/products for iOS only? I could understand it a few years back, but doing it today just cuts your market in half.

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Because even though iOS has fewer users, those users are more valuable. They tend to fall into higher income brackets and be higher spenders.

I don't doubt that :-)

But I wonder how long this will be the case. Anecdotally I'm seeing more people choose Android (or at least Samsung Android phones) - with a bigger user base, how long before the subset of early adopters/higher spenders is as big or bigger than those with an iPhone?

They don't buy apps though. I know maybe a dozen people with Android phones and (barring 1 person and 1 app) they have NEVER purchased an app. They don't pay for subscription services, they don't do in-game upgrades, they don't put any money into the phone. Its crazy. And the 1 person that did buy an app? It was an app to aid in pirating things.

This [1] is from their user guide for the notebook.

Device Support

Page Camera is currently available only on iOS (iPhone / iPad), but will be added to Android and other mobile platforms in the future. iPhone 3Gs, iPad 2, and earlier models are not optimal for Page Camera due to absence of flash and low camera resolution.

EDIT: Formatting.

[1]: http://evernote.com/getting_started/moleskine/#5

That's good news, thanks.

I think you answered your own question. Building iOS only is only half the effort as well. Half the effort for the more valuable half of the market gives disproportionate gains.

When you first release a product/feature, the people that are going to really use it are the "early adopter" crowd. Once they embrace it, then you can spend the capital to roll it out to the later adopters. I'd be willing to bet that Android has far fewer early adopters than iOS.

One thing precludes the other, though. How can Android users be early adopters if apps are consistently released on iOS first?

There's also a major fragmentation problem with Android: Evernote can look at the iPhone 4 sales figures and know that they'll have so many million potential users with the same hardware and OS; with Android they have to compare a ton of different models to see which ones have a usable camera and whether the vendor + carrier are holding up OS releases. If you want to prove an idea that's a lot of extra work.

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