Android Is Not Better. Neither Is iOS.
batsov.com
batsov.com
Now, I'm perhaps not serious about that, and I'm just reacting to the tone of "Android users are lesser people" that's been prevalent recently. But I will note that according to this report:
http://www.distimo.com/publications/archive/Distimo%20Public...
A $15.99 Final Fantasy game from Square-Enix made 73% of it's revenue from Android in May 2013 while the "free" Candy Crush Saga and Simpsons: Tapped Out games made much more money from iOS.
These "free" games are apparently designed around "Whales", people who spend literally thousands of dollars on them:
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/11/meet-the-whales/all/
"Lee says that spending money on games like Clash of Clans is actually saving him money in the long-run: Before he started gaming, he says he and a small group of friends would go out drinking, sometimes spending as much as $6,000 in a single night between them."
"He wound up spending nearly $5,000 in that game before trading it for Clash of Clans, but says that’s far less than what he would have otherwise spent on alcohol.
“I actually save money playing these games instead of going out and drinking,” he said.
...
"Vince P., who also asked us to withhold his last name, has been playing the Facebook game Battle Pirates since early 2011. His total spend: over $16,000.
“It does kind of shock me, for sure, that it was that much,” said Vince, who goes by the username “Spoon” in Battle Pirates. “And it’s all for nothing.”
Vince is 45 years old, divorced, with a 16-year-old daughter. He says he makes between $200,000 and $400,000 annually. He looked positively distraught over the situation during a Skype interview with Wired, as he tabulated a list of his receipts."
It's my semi-serious theory that these people, at least in the US, are more likely to own iOS devices.
PS: I already had google wallet set up due to previously using it to pay for something from my desktop.
I would have an easier time accepting this were it phrased differently. Are these people really idiots, or are they just vulnerable consumers? To draw a comparison, are alcoholics "idiots" or are they just vulnerable to alcohol? I believe that science tells us that is it the latter. To apply this, I'd be more likely to say:
"iOS makes more revenue in the app store because no average it's users are more susceptible to pressure to spend money."
This is a good point. I knew a guy who would probably classify as a whale. He made about 40k and because of his spending habbits was effectively quite poor.
It would be like two towns where one makes much more money in their restaurants, and boasts about their rich and discerning clientel and how the other town is full of people who can't appreciate good food, or are simply cheap etc. Very much making value judgements about people based on the size of the revenues.
But when you look into it, the vast majority of the money is spent on alchohol, and a fair portion of that is spent by people with drinking problems, which is encouraged by the restaurant owners.
You can and should feel sorry for those people, and angry at the people taking advantage of them, but in terms of disrupting the previous, and widely accepted, storyline of "connoisseurs of fine dining" the temptation to call them a town of winos is too much, for me at least.
(apps = food, games = alcohol in this terrible analogy. And I suppose these new breed of psychologically exploitative games are like caffeine-infused cocktails designed to get you messed up quickly or bars that encourage such drinking)
Ooh -- can I make silly generalizations, as well?
My personal favorite theory about why iOS makes more revenue in the app store, is that more Android users wildly mash at their phone screens with their giant, greasy potato-chip-dust-covered fingers in a Monster energy drink-induced aggro-fog and so are mostly unable to either understand or properly use their device well enough to access an app store and install stuff.
Or. Maybe people have different tastes for different reasons. And maybe the cherry-picked single data point that Final Fantasy III (which seems to have not sold very well at all) happened to be more popular on Android devices doesn't really mean much of anything conclusive (the PDF you linked to certainly doesn't have much to say about it). Maybe there are more "whales" on iOS simply because more users are comfortable using the platform and downloading apps, and given that app phones are damned near ubiquitous, both platforms will have smart-and-savvy users and rich (or poor or middle-class) "idiots." And everything in between.
Going back to iOS devices, they provide a simple filter. People who buy them pay more, and they are therefore likely to pay more again. It really says nothing about their income or credit card balance. It is purely about spending habits.
If this theory makes you feel better about your choice of platform, then bully for you. Just be aware of its implications.
(I certainly feel this. Ubuntu/Android suits me, but if I'd held my nose and bought an apple toolchain (mac->phone) 5 years ago I probably would be better off today.)
Nobody said they are lesser people. But iOS does sell to the richer demographics, the same way the Mac laptops are bought by richer and more urban demographics.
(Also: "idiots", really? Actually being richer makes it more common for them to have university education).
Plus, besides the guys only go for "open" and "tinkering", most of the other tech savvy users go for iOS. Where by tech savvy I don't mean hackers but people more likely to buy and use lots of apps, as opposed to just buying an occasional game or utility.
Sone example demographics: most people that care about mobile photography tend to buy iOS (and almost all books and projects done by amateur/pro photographers on a mobile phone, have been done with iPhones). Almost all people that care about mobile music (e.g synths, audio recorders, guitar amp emulations, et) buy iOS. Almost all mobile video projects I've seen were done on iOS, etc etc.
That Wired article is similarly ridiculous - I find it exceedingly hard to believe that people who spend $6000 on alcohol in one night and have to replace this inane habit with equally obscene in-app purchases aren't just outliers. They're also not indicative of any real substantial user-base.
What I'm trying to get at here is that your favorite theory is completely unsupported as written. It's a gross oversimplification, generalization, and it's potentially insulting.
> (iOS7 will have multitasking for all apps).
Not really. iOS7 allows more situations for the OS to wake up an app for a short amount of time, but there's no real multitasking as in android where you just write your service and stay running.
Aside of that, I agree with the article about strengths and weaknesses of the two platforms. I've used both Android and iOS over time, but in the end, many small things just let me prefer iOS, even though it's probably completely subjective at this point.
The biggest lock-in to iOS is iMessage though and I hate Apple for that as it makes it next to impossible for me to ever not use an iOS device as my phone any more: When you move your SIM card from an iOS device to a non-iOS device, there's a period of time during which Apple accepts iMessages for your number, especially when you have other devices configured with iMessage. At this point, people sending you an iMessage (it's not as if they get to chose) will think that the message is delivered (it might even say "delivered"), when in fact nothing the like has happened.
Worse: Even once this settles and apple's server stop accepting iMessages to a number, now the sender will see green chat bubbles instead of blue ones. This has caused me so much grief with non-technical iOS users, believing that something went wrong with delivering the message, causing them to call me after nearly every message they sent ("the bubble didn't look the same. did you get my message?")
This is an ugly mess and I don't see any motivation for Apple to fix it as it only punishes those who don't use iOS, never those using iOS.
The other big thing is visual voice mail which I really like and so far is not supported by Android (aside of some crappy carrier specific apps) even though in most cases it's just audio-files-over-imap that's powering the secret sauce under iOS.
If you turn off iMessage before removing the sim card this won't happen.
I do this all the time when switching between my HTC One X and iPhone 4.
The author having not used Android 4 makes this a very poor analysis. I also hated Android <3.0 and loved iOS for years.
Then I bought S3 (and now S4) with Android 4.2 and the improvement was massive. Android only recently got their shit together (design & performance wise) and it's now very competitive with iOS. Arguably much better in favor of Android if you're a hacker.
Cyanogenmod is very easy to install. There's no reason to be locked into old versions because of your smartphone vendor (assuming you're moderately technically savvy).
Chrome and Firefox alone were enough to make the switch worth it for me. Firefox extensions are just as rich as on the desktop, private browsing is quick and seamless, I also really enjoy the tab sharing between devices in Chrome. Tabs stay open all day and don't refresh every time I switch an app, files I download manifest themselves onto a file system I can easily consume with a USB cable. It just feels like a real browser experience, whereas iOS feels like a joke in comparison.
For that matter, I actually would prefer install ubuntu or firefox OS on it.
In the long term it will be a battle between mature and slowly changing phone/tablet OSes. Apple knows this, which is why they are desperately designing watches.
I only differ with OP in the fact that he pretty much blames device makers in the android case, and I think that the problem is more than just the device, at least that was the case before Ice cream sandwich, and at that point I was just done with Android.
Although this is probably my single biggest gripe with Android, you should employ just as little trust in any of the big tech companies at this point; Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc are all openly deceiving their customers. As Steve Gibson says, trust no one.
Using a few services like DropBox and Evernote eliminates some of the down-side of using two portable devices.
Different strokes for different folks and all that.
I'm also disappointed by everyone succumbing to the usual flame war-ish ideologies surrounding iOS and Android. One does not need to be better than the other. You can develop for both. Developing on either one has strategic advantages and disadvantages, and you can always port to the other later (okay, almost always).
It's so annoying that people attempt to crunch all the arguments for and against each operating system into a binary response to using either one. It's childish and uninformed.