Windows Phone 7 launches with a great ad

[famousringo]

disolitude said:

famousringo said:

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...

You're right that advertising revenue is a huge wild card in trying to gauge app revenue, but you underestimate Apple's position here and overestimate Google's.

Analysts are projecting that Apple's share of mobile advertising will roughly equal Google's by the end of this year (I know, I know, analyst projections are wrong all the time. I'm just going with the best info I have right now):

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2010/tc20100926_023792.htm

From a developer standpoint, all of Apple's 21% is paid to iOS developers, while a sizable chunk of AdMob's 21% is also paid to iOS developers (in May, 54% of AdMob ads were for iOS apps, 33% for Android. Alas, AdMob hasn't published any new reports since Google officially took control of them). It's hard to know, but it looks to me like ad-supported apps still earn more money on the App Store than they do on Android Market.

Meanwhile, Google can't assure that Android phones will even be able to use Google for search. As you note, Microsoft will stop at nothing to thwart Google:

http://gizmodo.com/5632186/samsung-fascinate-lightning-review-when-greedy-carriers-ruin-decent-phones

Bing is the default—and only—search engine on the Fascinate. A Google Android phone. In the search widget, in the browser, when you press the search button. Bing. No, you can't change it. There's no setting for it, and the Google Search widget that you can snag from the Market is blocked (or at least very carefully hidden).