Apple vs. Android: Developers see a socioeconomic divide
slate.com
slate.com
Go to the original map here https://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/brands/#, and turn off the iphone layer that happens to be on top. This is pathetic.
Im gonna call my buddy at mapbox.
It's true that one-word comments where the word is facepalm would nearly always deserve downvoting. Discernment is required!
The argument that iOS is more frequent in high income areas still seems fairly sound. Still, the story misrepresents the map by far.
So the map doesn't actually show that Android is doing poorly in high-value areas; it does, however, show that Android is doing well in low-value areas -- in addition to doing well in high-value areas. The data is a win for Android even if the map literally obscures this fact.
Once the tweet-density becomes higher than the maximum point density the area turns red. So any dense concentration of people is shown as red. Find a crowded poor neighborhood and it'll be red. And it's compounded by the way red pops out more than the green does. Also compounded by the annoying zoom level restriction.
Hmm, do I want a phone associated with rich people, or poor people?
That said, as long as you understand the economics of each platform and ensure that your advertising expenditures and any incremental user costs are in line with the disparity, you should be fine. In my experience, the best strategy is to spend any advertising budget on iOS installs, and let word of mouth/viral features get free installs on Android.
A better solution may be to mark everything up across the board - say 10% - and then offer Android users a 10% discount, while offering no discount to iOS users who are unlikely to be as price sensitive as Android users.
>> so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see
I used to be super bullish on Android, now much less so. It's sacrilege around here, but I'm beginning to think that ecosystems which are not primarily based on open source have broader economic benefits. Even the notion of barriers to entry (i.e. expensive dev tools) can serve a purpose, in that companies will invest more developing products in such situations with less fear that they're going to be nuked by some kids and an open source stack. (Of course in reality they just do less, but the free competitors problem isn't going to happen).
This is why I'm incredibly pessimistic about the web, and almost any technology attached to Google these days: it's simply far too competitive, and the barriers to entry, thanks to the cloud wars and modern software stacks, are getting smaller at a frightening rate. Google are smart enough that when you're in an ecosystem with them and they aren't doing the role you're doing it's because they've commoditized their complements: you.
My hunch is Google have been pursuing Glass, and now wearables, in a desperate way to attach their brand to the classes of people that carry iPhones. The Apple envy in Mountain View seems to run very deep indeed, but they're also trying to fight off Facebook at every turn, which has led to a very confused situation.
Understand that 'value' does not equal 'economic value'. There are many factors which make up the value of a good or a technology, some of them easily quantifiable - like your 'economic value', some of them less so. Also understand that in the long run the increased access to technology which free software and free protocols provide can actually lead to economic benefits as well.
You use the web as an example to support your thesis. Imagine what would have happened if CERN decided to license and sell web technologies in the way Apple and Microsoft license and sell their products. You would not have been able to write your comment here, on this web site, using that browser. There would not have been a web site for you to write it on. Even if you were 'lucky' enough to have some corporate sponsor to pay for your 'Platinum web access' voucher your comment would probably have lingered in the void for lack of readership. The web would have resembled America Online or Minitel, with limited interaction and commercial sites only. It would also have given but a fraction of the 'economic benefits' of the current, open web.
This is more true in developing countries. People buy expensive Android phones but they don't pay for data. Because it's even more expensive than the phone. If you say a phone lives for two year, it's easy to do the math and see a regular data plan is two to three time more expensive than an Android phone.
Would I shop more with my mobile devices if they were Apple? Maybe. My coworkers show me their most current generation Apple phones and tablets and WOW it's like I stepped 10 years into the future.
I agree that economic issues are a reality, but many low-end Android devices are not useful for shopping or paid apps, so that artificially makes the Android market look worse. It would be nice if the graphs could be further subdivided by some metric into, say, Android 4 devices capable of running apps, and older Android devices that don't have the speed, space, or otherwise are unusable anywhere outside of the phone or text screens.
The Samsung Galaxy and Moto X phones may be equivalent to an iPhone, but the iPhone outsells them 2:1. The Android phones that make up the bulk of the 80% market share just aren't equivalent.
And there are a lot of of those applications on Play Store.
Yeah, there are also a lot of ugly and unusable applications w/o an iOS counter part but well.
I think Android users are not willing to spend money of bad applications and the count of good and well designed applications is higher on iOS also because Apple enforces the design guidelines. Google doesn't do that.
While the iOS version works very well.
That is a frustrating experience.
I know so many companies that need good android devs and can't find any because nobody has the experience. From my anecdotal experience, the demand for Android Developers is much higher than iOS (relative to the supply) at the moment.
So, if iOS users overspend Android users more than android_user_count/ios_user_count times, iOS still offers more revenue.
Average spending and profit margins count as much, if not more, as raw user count. The same way that the Mac, say, has around 15% of the laptop market share, but takes home around 80% of the laptop market profits.
So, if I have $1,000,000 to spend on marketing and sales what's my best allocation? Exactly: $1,000,000 on iOS and $0 on Android until my data shows that I've saturated iOS.
I think it has as much to do with the fact that Apple's target market consists largely of affluent people seeking to identify with a brand that has geek/tech credibility. It's not that people with lower incomes wouldn't be (or aren't) interested in having Apple mobile products; it's that Apple basically ignores them.
I'd be curious to see if that's just confirmation bias on my part or a real trend.
Those with less expendable income are probably more likely to select a free device.
As an app developer I prefer Android over Apple because of how easy it is to deploy your app.