All those people with cheap Android smartphones have finally started buying apps | Hacker News Reader

All those people with cheap Android smartphones have finally started buying apps

qz.com

47 pointsjamesbritt19 comments

Spin spin spin... where it stops nobody knows.

Same data used in an article yesterday. http://www.macrumors.com/2013/08/12/apples-app-store-still-n...

This is an apples to orchards comparison and a very misleading title. The Google Play Store includes purchases of movies, TV shows, books, magazines, etc. You can compare it to the iTunes Store in its entirety, but certainly not to the "Apple App Store".

There are, still, far more experienced iOS developers than there are Android developers. Some people think the learning curve and development effort are steeper and higher for Android. I'm inclined to believe them if only because I think Android is a more expressive app environment, and it takes longer to learn, more effort to design, and longer to implement apps that take full advantage of Android. It's just going to happen more slowly than the iOS app market.

I think there are going to be waves or generations of Android software. We are about at the end of the "porting wave" and we'll next have a wave of apps that really digs in to the modularity, IPC, background processing, and RPC technologies available in Android. Facebook was an ambitious first try at a suite of cooperating apps, and I expect more successful attempts to follow.

In my opinion, it's just about the money. iOS users spend it more than Android users, thus more focus on iOS app development.

I completely disagree about the learning curve. In my experience, the iOS frameworks are quite complex and multi-layered (i.e. CoreData). Furthermore, you run into the fact that you have to learn Objective-C. The abundance of iOS experts probably has more to do with the fact that many Mac OSX developers easily transferred their skills to iOS development. With the Android platform, however many more developers know Java already, so that is less of a hurdle for your average dev.

In my anecdotal experience, for example, more college students try to do Android development, since they already know Java (taught in most college CS classes), whereas the students that try iOS development only do so because of the cachet of having an iPhone app.

What you say about college students is probably true now, but that has yet to have an impact on the wider pool of developers. Since college Java classes often start with interactive applications, stepping into Android after a bit of AWT is natural. I predict college Java courses will soon enough acknowledge that Android is interactive Java and start with Android.

Not really. Java has been a fairly standard educational language of choice for a loooong time. Well over a decade in the US educational/college system (reaching back to before 2000).

Core Data has to be the single-most difficult framework Apple offers (From their own documentation: "Core Data is not an entry-level technology.[0]"), so it makes a poor "ObjC is hard" starting point. Other than the message syntax, Objective-C is no harder to learn than any other language of it's type. Frankly, I think Android is needlessly complex, give that nearly ever app needs some combination of Activities, Receivers, Providers, etc, not to mention it's take on threading.

0. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/DataMan...

I did not cite Core Data when I argued that Obj-C is a hurdle. I cited Core Data as an example of the fact that iOS frameworks are complex. I also didn't claim that Objective-C is hard to learn. Merely that it presents a hurdle in a way that Java does not - any given developer is more likely to know Java than Obj-C, Java is more widely used and is general purpose language for a breathtaking variety of applications, whereas Objective-C is pretty much only used to Mac OSX apps and iOS apps.

Android is catching up really fast. The things you can do with it and some of the design choices can be quite clever. For example, the new Gmail app has pull-to-refresh, but they didn't want to look like a direct rip of lorenb/Twitter so they redesigned the visual concept completely.

It's not that refreshing. There are dozen of different pull to refresh animations across OSes. Check out Path's droplet, Facebook's simpler allow, Mailbox's no spinner at all (just an indication on the status bar), etc.

For those wondering, I believe that Google Play in China does not support purchases, thus their absence from this article.

I don't think most Chinese Android phones ship with Google Play, or any of the other Google apps.

The cheap "generic/no brand" ones don't, but the Huawei and ZTE ones do, and both companies are on track to be bigger than Samsung - Huawei made 35 billion last year, compared to Samsung Electronics' 52 billion. ZTE is smaller at 15 billion.

Speaking of Android phones, see for example the Huawei Ascend p6, not yet Samsung Galaxy S4 territory but it's getting closer:

http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_ascend_p6-5467.php

Edit: for completeness, a ZTE high-end phone, not yet as polished as Huawei's I think. Sold as "Sprint Vital" in the U.S.

http://www.gsmarena.com/zte_vital_n9810-5511.php

I’m more interested in trying something from those small Chinese brands than Huawei personally.

In fact, there is no Google Play in China

There is, but it used to offer only free apps.

Amazon, OTOH, does have paid app purchases, and so does Baidu.

http://www.itproportal.com/2013/05/07/amazon-beats-google-pl...

It seems Google is going to offer paid apps soon:

http://www.thebeijinger.com/forum/2013/05/02/google-play-sto...

I am really surprised that Australia drives more revenue than Germany, Canada or France. All have much greater populations and all are similarly wealthy nations.

However language probably is a factor...

Germany has 46 million english speakers. Canada and France have over 25 million. Australia has 17 million.

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