| superchunk said: 1) Android focuses on ads not upfront cost. 6 or half a dozen of the other its all the same. There are always ad-free versions for a cost. Consumers tend to want the free up-front cost with little ads, so in reality Android has the better system. 2) Fragmentation has been tossed out by dev after dev as really nonsense overall. Its just marketing banter from Apple mostly. 3) Tablets are really new... a real android tablet OS is not even a year old. It took a little while for Android phones to pick and and then steam roll past iOS. It will be the same in tablets as the OS has finally gotten there with Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. Then like Verizon's Droid line as the catapult for the phones, we have Kindle Fire and other lower priced android tablets to kick off the assault on tablets. We should revisit this topic in a year. Also, when you talk about locked down tablets... umm its a tablet. Its not a laptop. The greater mass of people will only want to use it for web and fun content. I know I'd rather buy a kindle fire for cheap than buy a fully featured tablet as I don't need all the other crap. I would rather use my phone for pics/recordings/phone etc. I'd only use the tablet for reading, games, movies, browsing, etc. With that I dont' need all the extra connections, cameras, etc. Beyond that, what else is it missing? Now, I'd rather not have Amazon's tailored UI, so I would root/rom it, but there will also be similar low cost tablets that don't have that UI as well as soon as vendors realize they should NOT be trying to build $600 laptops/tablet crossovers. Instead they should build $100 or $200 tablets. 4) I agree that Google shouldn't have allowed so much leeway with the customization on the overall UI, however, I don't think its a huge problem. For one, Nexus phones are starting to be on every carrier now and two, the various manufacturers are similar enough that its not hard to learn the differences. I've used Samsung, HTC, and Motorola and I think you're over exagerating the hardship by a lot. Apple will continue to have higher 'loyalty' rankings just as they do in every other market they are in. Its a cult. lol, jk. Fact is its just a different option with various plusses and minuses. I like the far larger choices and lower prices considering everything else is about the same give or take a thing here or there. |
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Android. They all but have marketshare domination locked up. Now the question is whether they can convert that marketshare into money. They'll make money, without a doubt. But can they make the market as profitable as Apple has over the past half decade? That's far from a given.
Anyway:
- Return on ad money versus paid applications is hardly equal. Trust me, I make a comic and also operate four of my own websites. It takes THOUSANDS of people clicking through on my site to equal a one dollar purchase. Not even close to the same thing. The guaranteed money is going to be more profitable than ads 99% of the time. Android devs are running ads because they have to, not because they want to. I'm not talking about which system is "better", I'm talking about which is more profitable. And that's the App Store, without question.
- My point about the skinned OS is that while you will root your tablet/phone, 99% of the population will not. I've rooted an Android tablet and it was a pain in the ass. Not terribly difficult, but not exactly base-consumer stuff either. And if Google keeps letting companies skin and restrict their OS a la the Kindle Fire, it creates a market for Amazon, not Android. The consumer has no loyalty, experience, or knowledge of Android. They own a Kindle. That means when it's time to upgrade, they are just as likely to go with an Apple product as another Android. Google hasn't fostered an environment that makes people want to stay between device upgrades while Apple has created an environment that coddles (and, to a point, restricts) the user into staying forever. And given Apple's massively high profit margins on this stuff, it means everyone will continue to make money. If everybody keeps making money, games/apps/developers will stay forever as well.
Look at a game like Tiny Wings (among others). It has made soooooo much money on iOS and the developer hasn't even bothered to port it to Android. I'm sure they'll get to it sooner or later but when the App Store is the proven money-maker for developers, they will give it priority over other platforms. Another example is Contre Jour. A beautiful, great-selling game on iOS that would struggle under an advertisement model because of its limited gameplay length. Hence, the game has yet to arrive on Android while it's been on the iPad (and is one of the best games for the device) for a year or so. I can name you a half dozen *great* games for iOS that aren't available on Android yet I can't name one that has the reverse situation.
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