| rocketpig said: 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. |
I can't really discount any of that. For one, I'm not in the industry to really know what the ROI is on a up front paid app vs ad based, but since FB operates on solely ad based plus micro transaction, I'd have to think its highly profitable... and yeah, I fully agree that Google should not have left Android as open as it has been as they do lose brand recognition to a degree. But, in your scenario above, I think the user would not look at an iPad so quickly after having a Kindle, but a new Kindle first.
