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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

I don't like that Flickr is so focused on the iPhone. It's a free app, and yet it chooses to make a big SEND TO IPHONE button on the screen, and completely hides that it even supports Android, even though there are more Android phones in the world at this point. I just don't understand what's the reasoning behind focusing so much on the iPhone. Are they trying to pretend they are focusing on a niche or what?

http://www.flickr.com

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Android may be the more popular platform in general, but there sure are an awful lot of iPhones being used to take pictures for Flickr, and apparently not a whole lot of Android phones.

The most popular camera on Flickr: the iPhone 4S. Not just the most popular cameraphone—the most popular camera. The second most popular at the moment? The iPhone 4.

Cameras brands, in order of popularity on Flickr: Canon, Nikon, Apple, …, Samsung, HTC, …, Nokia, Kodak, Motorola …

Cameraphone popularity, in order: iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, iPhone 3GS, Samsung Galaxy S II.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/cameras/

Perhaps they're causing some bias in these numbers today by not pushing the Android app, and some more bias by not reporting Android phones as a group, but given the data they have, I'm not surprised they push the iOS app over the Android version. It looks like their user base is very heavily biased towards the iPhone.

To add, perhaps iPhone users are more engaged with Flicker to the point where iPhone interactions outnumber Flicker interactions.

Taking this a step further, perhaps Flicker is trying to align more with the iPhone/Apple brand than the Google (Picassa/+) brand.

thats because the camera quality on most android phones is awful. Iphone is clear, crisp, sharp and most importantly QUICK!

I love my galaxy note to pieces but I still take photos on my iphone!

Android has shipped more phones but they're far less used, mostly due to the same reason it's so much more expensive to develop for: for every iPhone-competitive Android phone in use there is at least one phone with marginal hardware, an antique unsupported OS release, horrible vendor/carrier modded UI. All those “free smartphone” offers count towards units shipped even if the only app regularly used is Facebook. If you're Flickr, you also have to deal with the crazy range in camera quality - akin to having to support everything from the iPhone 1 to 5.

Google's inability to get carriers & vendors to be serious platform maintainers is the best thing which happened to Apple.

I think that's just coz they have a new revamped iPhone app.

I find it odd myself, but it might be because Android cameras are not as popular as any iPhone on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/cameras/

If you wanted to make money as a mobile app developer, would you put your effort into Android?

Its a free app.

TANSTAAFL

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