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disolitude on 12 October 2010
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famousringo said:
DirtyP2002 said:

nice one. Apps are coming soon for windows phones I guess. And some very good games as well. But who needs X-thousand apps? I have an android phone right now and Apple faboys telling me iOS is better, because it has 200k apps and android only 100k. I use 3 apps actually. One game, one football-scores-ticker and a Halo Reach soundboard :D


The number of apps in a store is just a pissing contest at this point. Nobody really cares how many wallpaper apps and individual e-books an app store has.

The real contest is in app store revenue. In other words, it's not the number of apps but the number of apps people are willing to pay for. Right now, the revenue estimates I see put Android Market at less than 5% the size of Apple's App Store, and unless that changes dramatically, it means Android will be a second-class citizen for developers.

Otherwise it will turn out kind of like Mac OS vs. Windows. Sure, you can find good software to do the most common tasks on Mac OS, but on Windows you find more alternatives for the common tasks, you're much more likely to software for an uncommon task, and the software you find on both platforms will tend to work better on Windows because it's the lead SKU rather than an afterthought port. The Windows software market dwarfs the Mac OS software market, and the value of Mac OS suffers for it.

Mrstickball has a good summary of the challenges facing Android Market on his blog. It's obviously not much of an issue for you with only 3 apps, though. Like the targets of this ad, you're mostly interested in the phone hardware and basic functions of the OS.

I finally had time to go through Stickballs blog... While he is right in saying that apps generate more revenue for Apple than Andriod phones, he fails to recognize that Google doesn't really care about that. 

They have 10X better infrastructure for advertising and generating revenue in the mobile market than Apple will ever have. Googles strategy is simple...get as many phones out there and make money on avertising revenue. Google search, display ads, text ads, free apps with ads...thats what Google is going for. Apple is stuck making money on hardware and apps as their advertising marketshare is non existant. No email clients (gmail, Hotmail), no 20 million per day visits on the homepage (Msn.com), no search engine...

Microsoft knows this very well and have been trying to steal as much search marketshare as possible from google. In the mobile market, search and text ads revenue is going to be trending up for a long time to come...