If not the ipad then what instead?

[rocketpig]

mrstickball said:

rocketpig said:

Angry Birds also has an INCREDIBLE play time per user. Because of its immense popularity, it's also only a $.99 game when they could easily get $2 for the title (and they get $3 on iPad, how do you think the Android tablet version of AB stacks up against that in revenue per user?).

In short, Angry Birds is not representative of the market.

As someone who has a lot of experience with click-through revenue, I know what it takes to reach parity with another paid product. The average game is not getting the requisite 2-3 clicks per user it requires to reach even a $1 threshold, as Rovio is not selling that click-through space at much more than $.50 per click and could be getting as little as $.30 per click.

I understand that. But as I've said: even in regards to the paid market, Android is slowly creeping up on iOS. It'll take more time for it to happen, but the gap is slowly moving in favor of Android. If Google ever fixes their fragmentation problems even slightly, they will decimate iOS due to their >50% market share of all smartphones being sold.

I agree, though I wouldn't call it "creeping". I'd say Android is catching up through "bludgeoning the market with phones while maintaining a pretty piss-poor sell-through per customer". 

If Google fixes their fragmentation issues, yes. But they're not taking any logical steps to do it. They continue to allow carriers and manufacturers to control update schedules. They continue to allow carriers and manufacturers to drop support for a phone entirely, like HTC/AT&T did to my top of the line Inspire six months after launch. I don't see Google fixing their fragmentation problems. I see them continuing to muck this up until Apple completely stablilizes their marketshare and someone else (Microsoft?) start to shoehorn in on top-end phone sales. Android can continue to dominate the bottom tiers of the phone market with this strategy but in the long-term their absolutely atrocious handling of hardware support is going to bite them in the ass on upper-end phones. After what happened to my Inspire (one upgrade to 2.3, still buggy, no plans to update again), they've lost me as a customer. Fuck them. I didn't spend $100-200 on a highly specced phone to see it get one update and then be left on the vine to wither when it has plenty of horsepower to run ICS (1ghz Snapdragon, 768 RAM). I never thought I'd say this but there's a damned good chance I'm going back to iPhone unless WP7 can lure me over. I can't be the only one who feels this way, either.

If MS gets Nokia rolling with more/bigger phones like the beautiful Lumia 800 and if Apple finally pulls their head out of their ass and launches a 4" iPhone, watch out Android. And if Microsoft can make ground on the upper end of the phone market, they'll have no problem attracting developers. Those are the customers that spend money and developers love to work with Microsoft. They have developer support down to an art and know how to avoid the many pitfalls Android has fallen into over the past three years.