Selected gems from a NYT article titled “App Makers Take Interest in Android”. Now, Android could very well one day be a viable marketplace for apps, but the article and the developers interviewed keep hitting on all the wrong reasons.
When Rovio, the Finnish software development company behind the popular iPhone game Angry Birds, decided to release a version for Android, the company spent months testing the game on a variety of devices to make sure it was up to par. “It’s so fragmented,” said Peter Vesterbacka, a developer at the company. “It’s a lot more challenging than developing for one device, like the iPhone.”
In the end, he said, it was worth the trouble. The game was downloaded more than three million times in the first week. But the company, which charges 99 cents for the iPhone version and has made millions of dollars that way, chose to give away the Android version and include ads. This is in part because paid apps on the Android Market are available in only 32 countries, versus 90 for the Apple App Store, and Rovio was concerned that people who were not able to purchase the app would just pirate it.
But developers also say that charging for apps simply may not be the path to profit on Android.
“Google is not associated with things you pay for, and Android is an extension of that,” said Mr. Hall of Larva Labs. “You don’t pay for Google apps, so it bleeds into the expectations for the third-party apps, too.”
Sounds like a viable business.
“With Apple, you can spend months writing software only to be denied,” Mr. Novak said. “The biggest reward as a developer is getting your software out there, and quick. That makes everything else worthwhile.”
Actually the chance of being denied is almost zero with the current guidelines, but even before it was always one in several tens of thousands (you don’t get 300K apps in your store by rejecting much) and it only reared its’ ugly head if you made some very stupid decisions in your app design.
Still, getting the software out there quickly, even if that “there” place has no chances of commercial success, is the biggest reward for a developer. A non-professional developer, that is.
They also note that it is a lot easier to stand out in a pool of 100,000 apps versus 300,000, the current tally for Apple’s store.
Yes, it’s SO much easier for customers to find your app among 100,000 than it is among 300,000. Or among 100,010 for that matter. “Diminishing returns” is not the right phrase, but it’s the first that comes to mind.
“Apple’s App Store is getting overcrowded and saturated,” said Eric Metois, a freelance tech consultant who writes apps on the side for the iPhone and Android.
Mr. Metois’s first iPhone app, iChalky, featuring a dancing stick figure, has sold more than 300,000 copies on the iPhone since it was released in December 2008. His second attempt, a game called Sparticle, was not as successful.
“I poured 500 hours into my second app on the iPhone and sold virtually no copies,” Mr. Metois said. In explaining why he recently released an Android version of iChalky, he said, “There was a chance that on another emerging platform, iChalky would have a similar amount of success.”
Yes, a new market should probably fix the bad sales, there could be nothing wrong with the app itself.
“The promise of Android goes beyond one device,” Mr. Rubin said. “We’re going to see products running Android that no one has ever envisioned possible.”
Or cared for.
