iOS Products - Is Apple going the way of Blackberry?

[rocketpig]

nightsurge said:

rocketpig said:

wick said:

ebw said:

wick said:
It's like the PC vs MAC battle all over again.

I guess Apple don't learn from their mistakes.

Yup, all the developers target iOS first due to lower costs (very few OS versions and devices to support) and higher sales ($11 billion and counting), leaving Android users to whine and beg for late ports.  It totally reminds me of being a Mac user in the late '90s.  Android can stay afloat with Google-proprietary apps, just like Apple made iLife and Final Cut Pro exclusive to MacOS in those days.  If history repeats itself, Android might eventually grow into a decently popular option that can finally call itself part of the mainstream.

Considering Android own 75% of the market, your whole statement has just been shot down in flames.

Last I read, the average iOS user spends four times as much money on apps as the average Android user. And also, iOS web traffic is still higher than Android traffic despite Android dominating the market. That means iOS users actually use their devices, something ad-based developers live and die by. Marketshare, while important, is not the only story here.

So, yeah, there's a reason why developers still prefer to write for iOS and port to Android. It's easier to write for iOS, there are less versioning and fragmentation problems, and you only have to write for 5-7 hardware configurations at any given moment.

Regarding spending money on apps, I am sure that is likely because there are millions more free apps on Android as opposed to iOS where it seems the $.99 app is much more common rather than being free/ad supported.

Regarding web usage, I bet a large portion of that is due to the iPad since that is used quite a lot in business and has been around in the tablet market much longer. I noticed you didn't quote some solid statistics though, and I imagine that every day that web traffic stat gets closer and closer to Android's favor.

Programming for Android is actually very easy. Especially for those used to Java programming. And the fact that it is an open market without all the overly strict processes involved with Apple leads many developers to go Android first, then port to Apple later. More and more this seems to be becoming the case. I know in my company, all of our apps are first released on Android and then slowly ported over as we have time.

As someone else pointed out, the statistics are showing marginal Android growth over the past year in web usage. I'm not bashing Android at all. As a web developer, I don't care who "wins" this battle. I program for the "winner" no matter who it is.

In my own experiences (largely in US-based websites with US-based traffic), iOS traffic has exploded to over 18% of my overall traffic, up from 13.something% a year ago. In that same timeframe, Android traffic has gone from 6.something% to 7.5%. Far lower than I expected given the sales figures of Android-based devices (these numbers are including all iOS and all Android products).

And free ad-based apps only support my notion that developers will continue to program for iOS first. Ad-based revenue almost never pays as well as up-front money for an app. As someone with plenty of web advertising experience, I can say this with absolute certainty. You need need at least a thousand views (probably more) from every user to make up the $.70 you earn from a 99 cent app. That's just not going to happen. Mobile advertising doesn't pay for shit. It's awful compared to desktop-based advertising, which is already a giant step down from every other form of advertising. A single person can barely make a decent living from a million pageview per month website, much less a million pageview per month mobile app.

Again, I'm not bashing Android. I'm simply pointing out that there are tangible benefits to the closed eco-system used by Apple and it doesn't only benefit Apple itself. Developers can thrive in such an environment as well. To offset and overcome this discrepency, Android is going to have to push sheer volume through marketshare, which they appear to be doing quite well, just not at the pace I expected in regards to users actually using the device.