As bad as this sounds, I think that those who wish to get in bed with Apple deserve what they get. There are plenty of other platforms that can make money, and after my post on the lack HN thread regarding why people don't move over to Android produced few answers. It is also a topic of much discussion on the Readability blog post; a topic the author has yet to address.
The App Store can be very good for those who work with it, but in the same way that using Adsense can be good for those who use it. There are other options; they may not be the industry leaders, but they are viable options and you'd be a fool to turn down a platform with 100 users just because a tough platform with 110 users is better known.
In the same way that some men are attracted to insane girls, it seems that some developers simply cannot get enough of Apple's tough, kinky, anti-trust-bound love.
There are plenty of other platforms that can make money
List them, please.
Winmo has been a complete failure so far.
Android has shipped a lot of handsets, but the users don't seem to like to pay for apps.
Nokia is dead.
Palm is dead.
The next closest competitor to the Apple App Store is still nothing more than a tiny dot on the horizon. Maybe that will change, but most developers want to get paid TODAY.
I don't expect WP7 to immediately take the market by storm. If anything, Microsoft showed what they do with the Zune; they don't care for market dominance, just a share of that market will do them just fine. WP7 won't be the dominant phone, but I can see it being the new Blackberry and finding a great niche of paying customers.
> Android has shipped a lot of handsets, but the users don't seem to like to pay for apps.
This is the attitude I cannot understand. People won't pay money for things that don't provide value, regardless of platform. Choosing Apple because "iPhone users pay for stuff" is like opening a McDonalds by a public school because "they've got the money to buy things". The Android market isn't perfect, but it's getting better and better and people that make good apps for Android will likely be rewarded by great sales.
people that make good apps for Android will likely be rewarded by great sales.
Except that it seems most developers who have an iOS app and and Android app report far better sales from the iOS version of their apps.
In some sense you are correct, people will buy things that provide value to them. What is unclear is if the "value" in their Android handsets is the availability of apps, or the greater availability of free apps. People buying iPhones seem to expect to pay for additional apps. It's unclear if people buying Android devices expect to pay for apps, or if they expect it to be FOSS, where the majority of the apps are free. If it's the latter case, then Android may never be a profitable primary distribution source for developers, though it can be potentially monetized in other ways.
To my knowledge most developers aren't exactly earning a mint from either platform. There are success stories on each platform, although as the iPhone at one time had more users it seemed only logical to go for that market.
Android is now at a point where the average user couldn't care less about OS having open-source aspects. The reason few people buy apps for Android is because while there are a lot of apps most of them are awful or have free alternatives. This is what separates the iPhone experience from the Android experience, and in my mind this is why people don't spend big on Android, and why people would if the right app came along.
It can, but many prefer to be be to charge a price for an app and give a great user experience rather than making it free and stuffing it with ads. iOS allows you to do this far easier that Android does currently.
Totally agree. I'm a single developer/designer who makes a lot of money from the App Store. A lot of my friends have six figure incomes because of the App Store. When a platform puts money in your account and food on the table, it's a little difficult to rage against it.
Given that this is recurring revenue and not dependent upon new sales (though, yes, dependent on new content packs), I'd say it's pretty well done. With the caveat that Angry Birds is the outlier, not the norm.
My sympathies are 100% with Android but until the underlying audio & media APIs are much more mature I just can't implement the kinds of apps I'm interested in on Android. I'm keeping an eye on it though.
Absolutely. In a way the most shocking aspect of all this is that Google hasn't jumped at the opportunity to bring established app developers over to their platform. If Google continues to wait around and not refine their tools I can see Microsoft moving in to establish themselves as the underdog and as a strong developers choice.
What kind of apps? As of Gingerbread, the NDK supports OpenSL ES, which seems like a perfectly decent API for games and other low-latency audio applications.
Contrast this with iOS which provides the robust and featureful CoreAudio api. As far as I can tell there doesn't appear to be anything like the new Accelerate framework introduced in iOS 4 for Android either, so things like native FFT aren't available.
The App Store can be very good for those who work with it, but in the same way that using Adsense can be good for those who use it. There are other options; they may not be the industry leaders, but they are viable options and you'd be a fool to turn down a platform with 100 users just because a tough platform with 110 users is better known.
In the same way that some men are attracted to insane girls, it seems that some developers simply cannot get enough of Apple's tough, kinky, anti-trust-bound love.