As a developer I think the stats that matter are % of web traffic and app sales, which at least from the last I've seen dramatically lag total android handset sales. That may change but my anecdotal experience are that a lot are sold as upgrades without people really engaging with the additional functionality where as iPhones seem to be an intentional choice for that additional functionality.
I think app sales a vastly overrated. In my last 15 years as a software developer, only once did a company pay me to make an application that was sold to people. As a customer, most of the software I use does not cost any money. There are only a few categories where app sales work: mostly consumable items like games or movies. Some tools are doing great as well. But most do not.
Most programs are written for business cases other than getting money from license sales to individuals.
Last year I wrote an Android app for a gambling company that now generates 4.5 million Euro in revenue every single month. And the app is not even in the Play store, you have to download it from a website that is embarrassingly hard to find. And the app can only be used in countries where gamling is legal.
We did not charge 99 cents for the app, and somehow there was money to pay my bills anyway.
Then there is the ebanking app I used today: free. And the hipmunk app I use to search for flights. Free. And the audible app. And the kindle app. And the facebook app. And the ebay app. And the Google Search app. And the wikipedia app. And an information app from my government. And the app that let's me see the TV program.
All free of charge. Still, there is a business model and good money behind almost all of these apps.
Again: there are definitely certain apps that you can sell for money, and statistics about how many people buy apps on each platform are of course interesting.
But app sales are not what makes a platform live or die. What makes a platform live or die is reach.
Android is currently in the hands of most people that own a smartohone. That includes rich people and poor people and those who buy apps and those who don't. If you want to reach people through their smartphones, then you want to make an app that runs on Android.
If this was a real money gambling app, then either (a) the odds were stacked against the player by 1-2%, or (b) there was rake (for non house games like poker), so there was no need to charge for the client.
If you think about it, that's how FTP or Poker Stars works. Download a free client, even play for free for play money, earn money on rake once they convert to 'real money' players.
To be fair to the GP this is typically viewed as an entrepreneur's forum and does not typically focus on finding freelance or contract work. Apps can therefore be sold directly to customer by the developer as a sole-proprietor using Apple or Google's distribution platform. Nevertheless, Android does appear to offer its users more in the way of free apps in the anything goes environment that is Google Play.
Do you have any more details about the gambling app? You've piqued my interest. Feel free to send me an email (it's in my profile) if you don't want to share publicly.
This is almost certainly true, except for the "stats that matter" bit. If you want to sell an app today, iOS is still the platform to target first. But that's not a stable position.
If Android becomes the platform that "everyone" has, then the next disruptive consumer change is, almost by definition, going to happen there. This is largely what happened to the Mac -- the platform that had the best of everything in 1988 was, by 1994, suddenly unable to run all the new toys everyone wanted. When Win95 was released it wasn't even all that technically superior anymore. And by 1998 it was almost dead (and, but for the iPod's success, probably would have died).
That anecdotal experience doesn't match mine, all my friends with Androids have plenty of apps installed, a frequent question I hear from new Android users is 'What are some good apps to install?'. If you look at the Facebook app in Google Play[1] it says it has 100-500 million installs, that's a big chunk of all Android devices.
Don't be fooled, I know quite a few people (generally older, 50+) who got their iPhones as upgrades and didn't even realize they had browsers until I showed them.
I'm not sure these pages really offer evidence one way or the other, but I do agree my anecdote shouldn't be taken as gospel.
Regarding your second link specifically I know lots of folks who stick to using LTE on their Android devices instead of their wifi because LTE is often faster than their home internet, so I'm not sure that showing Android phones are less likely to use WiFi really means anything.
>I know lots of folks who stick to using LTE on their Android devices instead of their wifi
Actually Akamai research confirmed that Android and iPhone are neck to neck for cellular traffic. Because of the iPad wifi traffic for iOS is more than Android but that may change with the release of Nexus 7.
I guess the point is though that if you look at Apps sold and web traffic then you're eliminating users from both platforms that may own the phones but aren't really engaged.
Large groups of people, even technical people, still see these pocket-sized computers as "the thing in my pocket which forces me to speak with people", and just want to ignore it.
What would be interesting to see is how that 68% is sliced. How much of that % has access to the official Google Marketplace, How much of that % are non Google approved phones etc. Those numbers give would give developers a better sense of what the potential market size is like, and help identify gaps in the market.
The Android share is somewhat like the DOS market at the beginning of the nineties. While DOS commanded a sizable share verses Mac OS, it was broken down into 3 variants (MSDOS, DRDOS, PCDOS) with sub versions (MSDOS 5, DRDOS 6 etc). While they were mostly compatible they had enough differences to cause developers headaches.
MSDOS technically won out because Microsoft married Windows and MSDOS together to get Windows 95 killing off the other DOS variants (and the alternative Windows shells like Norton) in the process.
Also remember that Apple's reward for losing was ending up the most profitable PC vendor so things didn't end up so bad for them.
what would really be interesting to see is how much of ios browsing comes from ipads; cause iphone screen is quite small to do anything; forget browsing
Yes, the forced data plans are irritating. I bought a used unlocked phone from another carrier and activated it on the target carrier. Their database has no a priori knowledge that my IMEI is a smartphone, so no data plan is forced on me. WiFi data works great, though, and I disable all the other data connections to avoid accidental data charges.
Based on contract costs I really think the names are reversed. I know I did not obtain a smartphone until work agreed to pick up the monthly costs.
The number of people who have them sometimes boggles my mind. I have friends and relatives for whom it is a major expense. People are paying quarter to half what they would pay on a car not for these phones.
I pay about as much per month to insure my car as I do for smartphone service and personally feel that I get more value out of my smartphone than I do out of my car. In fact I frequently find myself weighing the pros and cons of eliminating my car in order to save on recurring costs - this never enters my mind for the smartphone.
Agreed. While I have no plans on getting rid of my car, my phone is easily a more valuable and useful tool. Of course, I work from home as an iPhone dev, so you can take that with a grain of salt :-)
Are there similar (recent) numbers for tablets yet? I am curious whether the Nexus 7 & Kindle Fire are putting a dent into the iPad's domination of the tablet market.
Android's growth was completely predictable for anyone who was intimately familiar with Symbian. I'd say that Android is much more the "Series 60" of this generation. It's the same model (albeit more open) that Nokia rode to market dominance.
I have a hard time thinking this matters. 68% of smartphones worldwide are Android devices. Close to 70% of profits from smartphones worldwide go to Apple (http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/06/apple-mobile-industry-profit-s...) which doesn't make Android devices.
On pretty much every metric except eyeballs, Android is losing (including the value of eyeballs - advertising doesn't matter if the people seeing your ads cant pay for your product), so why does 68% of market share matter?
This involves a pretty dangerous assumption, which is that the current methods of monetizing phones are the only ones that matter -- and it sounds as though you're trying to make an even more unpleasant assumption, which is that wealthy people are the only people that matter.
This is Hacker News -- a site for people who set out to build things that don't exist yet. the ability to target 68% of the world's smartphone-using population seems pretty interesting to me. For example, consider an education platform, as Nicholas Negroponte attempted to with the OLPC project. Whether there's monetization or not, there might be an interesting opportunity there.
Open your mind a little. Not everything is about the profit-making horserace.
>>Open your mind a little. Not everything is about the profit-making horserace.
At the end of the day, it's money that makes the world go round. If you're making more profit than your competitors, you're getting ahead, because you have more money for R&D, more money for marketing, more money for buying promising start-ups, and more money for lawsuits.
I mean, the fact that Apple has a war chest of tens of billions of dollars in cash - more than the treasuries of many countries - paints a really bleak and hopeless future for Android.
This is wrong even in the context of economics. The whole history of the tech industry is a story of cheaper mass market solutions winning out over more expensive ones. Apple is the "IBM" in this chapter and Android is the "DEC" (or "Apple" I guess, though that's confusing). That's not a great place to be, even though it makes you more money in the short term.
While money doesn't make the world go round it does pay for producing your next set of products. So if you aren't making money on your current handsets, eventually you'll run out of capital to continue developing your next gen handsets.
"...paints a really bleak and hopeless future for Android."
Siri, remind enraged_camel to read this comment again in five years. Having a lot of money on hand doesn't mean you can easily spend all your competitors out of business.
"I mean, the fact that Apple has a war chest of tens of billions of dollars in cash - more than the treasuries of many countries - paints a really bleak and hopeless future for Android."
How does stupid bullshit like this actually make it to this website?
I have no idea how you think this is a relevant point. Clearly people seeing Android ads can afford to buy Androids, as they have 68% market share.
Profit only matters if you own Apple. I'm more concerned with the variety of options I have as a consumer, and the competition between manufacturers driving them to produce better hardware.
Android is very popular in a lot of poor countries which means it's not going to make much money as the IPhone. Even in the US, Android is more popular in the lower-income demographics.
However, smartphones could be life-changing for poor people. They probably won't be able to afford a computer but an Android phone for under $100 is within their reach.
Poor people with smartphones mean they have access to more information and will be able to communicate easier. I've read stories about how basic phones with SMS empowered people in poor countries. They could do much more with smartphones.
So if everything is about the money, yeah, Android is definitely losing.
I think that was an odd situation that had a lot to do about how software was distributed and consumed then.
Even if Android keeps gaining marketshare -lets say it gets to 70/75%- I don't think this will play the same way as Mac/PC did in the 90s. Most of what people do these days with a computer / phone is platform agnostic (web browsing, for instance).
So the metric that matters in the web server market is that Microsoft is killing Apache, Nginx by taking a huge percentage of the profits with IIS? It's funny how pereception can be manipulated when you have a bunch of influential bloggers pushing an agenda and talking about statistics that fit their slant.
I just picked up my first Android phone on the weekend (Galaxy S3), and some parts I really love. Widgets change the way I use my phone. But compared to the iPhone, it's far less intuitive, it's build quality is crap, and I can't make it though a day on a charge. I wish there was another phone maker that had the polish of Apple with the freedom of Android.
Most likely the reason that it can't make it through a day without a charge is because of 4G/LTE. If battery life is that important, you can force your phone to only use 3G and you will see much greater life.
I'm in a city without LTE yet for this carrier, so that isn't it. Haven't installed any apps that should be background intensive either. I used to stream music all day from the iTunes match and still have more battery than what I have just listening to previously downloaded music.
All the more reason to turn off LTE in the phone. Not sure how the phone is configured, but it's entirely possible the phone is using up battery trying to find non-existent LTE towers unless it's explicitly disabled
(but I do agree with you in that battery life in most of the android phones is terrible)
I installed "System Tuner" and found that my live wallpaper was chewing up CPU even when I wasn't browsing the main desktop. Once I switched to a different (non-broken) wallpaper my battery life doubled.
I've also used this tool a few times to figure out why my phone was running hot (even though I wasn't using it). For instance, last night, my Facebook app was in a bad state and was chewing up 20% CPU in the background. I killed it and everything was back to normal.
The tool isn't the easiest to use, but it might help.
Exactly, you don't need to do this with iPhone, this just illustrates the point of unpolished software. Why should I waste my day looking at battery usage for apps. Maybe I should also look at the CPU monitor for half an hour to get an overall understanding of what is happening on the phone, so that I can make a correct decision in turning some apps off in the morning and turn some apps off at lunch etc...
That's because the iPhone severely limits what you can do with it. I'd say a one-time investment of 5 minutes to solve any battery life issues you might encounter is irrelevant compared to the feature differences between iPhone and Android.
I desperately pray for a day when I can look at comments on an Android or iOS story without seeing likely fictitious anecdotes (why does anyone who has ever used an iPhone seems to think they are in some sort of unique, privileged position to pass judgment, as an aside?).
This is a recurring problem that undermines any ability to discuss these platforms without noisy conversations.
Your observations are not meaningful or unique or valuable, nor are your subjective comments (e.g. build quality) interesting. Let everyone who feels some compelling need to inject these useless mini-reviews in every discussion know this.
To address your aside, if they're referring to their personal experience with an Android phone and they've also used an iPhone, they're more qualified in passing judgement over someone who hasn't touched both phones. Stop trying to glaze his comment with a brushstroke of snobbery - that is the most irritating quality I encounter in circles such as these.
they're more qualified in passing judgement over someone who hasn't touched both phones
I would argue that it isn't true at all: People who are accustomed to one thing (whether it is taste in wine or acclimatization to an interface) tend to go into another thing from the basis that the things that are new are unimportant, and the things that are different are wrong. See: Every Facebook interface change. Actually simply see almost any interface change ever.
Coming from an iPhone is not an enlightened position, and it only holds relative merit in discussions with other people perhaps moving from an iPhone. To the general population it is meaningless.
However what I was speaking specifically to is the odd belief among the iPhone community that they have been exposed to what is right, and their subjective opinions are henceforth objective instead of just personal opinion.
Let me give you a perfect example -- the design of the Galaxy S III. It was openly mocked among the iPhone community as being a device designed by lawyers: It is unlike the iPhone, therefore it is a wrong design that must have been compromised to differ as much as possible. I'm not really terribly sensitive to designs of devices, so I had no personal opinion, but I have noticed that I keep hearing everyday normal people calling the Galaxy S III sexy. Isn't that bizarre? It was objectively called an ugly device by the people in the know, or so it seemed, only actual consumers think otherwise.
> I'm not really terribly sensitive to designs of devices, so I had no personal opinion, but I have noticed that I keep hearing everyday normal people calling the Galaxy S III sexy. Isn't that bizarre?
What's bizarre is that your "perfect example" is but another personal anecdote, the very thing you've spent the whole thread raging against.
That would be a good counterpoint if I cast that observation out of nowhere, vindicating the GS III. In reality, however, we are specifically talking about anecdotes and personal opinion, hence anecdotes and personal opinion. The entire point being that it is all noise.
Another problem, besides the ones huggyface is pointing out, is that if everyone decided to share their experience on a story like this, there will be 4000 comments.
I don't think many such anecdotes are fictitious like huggyface does--I think people just enjoy sharing their experiences--but I do think they are intensely irrelevant except en masse, and forums like these are not the place for that.
There are countless very thorough professional reviews of the Galaxy S III available. There are countless very thorough reviews of Android proper. Many of them by people who have actually touched both platforms extensively, and many extensively compare the two. Personal, usually agenda-driven, subjective summaries are not useful as as reply to stories like this. They simply aren't.
Rather, I think huggyface is saying that slandering a product without facts/evidence is not very productive and is better to have off of HN.
It would be nice if more people on HN back up their claims with facts and sources. Instead, people bring up anecdotal evidence and leave it at that.
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Far less intuitive
This is kind of hand-wavy. Can you expand on this and say what you don't like about it?
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Opinions are great, but they leave a lot to be desired, I think, unless you have a feel for the person.
If I know that you are very critical about particular UI elements and that you like iOS for specific features that are missing on Android, then great! I'll trust you with your opinion. But I don't know you, so fleshing out this anecdotal story into something more factual would be much better for me.
"While everyone has the right to have questions and theories, only believable people have the right to have opinions. If you can't successfully ski down a difficult slope, you shouldn't tell others how to do it, though you can ask questions about it and even express your views about possible ways if you make it clear that you are unsure." -- #194 from Principles by Ray Dalio
But compared to the iPhone, it's far less intuitive, it's build quality is crap, and I can't make it though a day on a charge
Ignoring hilariously subjective statements on intuitive interfaces or build quality (that fuzzy measure that has nothing to do with actual suitability to task or hardiness, but instead ends up being a reflection of what people have been told build quality is. If you make a hammer out of glass, is that superb built quality?), I'll focus on something more empirical -- battery life. I happen to have a GS III, and coincidentally I forgot to plug it in last night (it isn't the first time I've done this). I am currently on hour 29 off the charger, with medium to heavy use, with the battery at 33%. So what now? Do we wage a battle of anecdotes? Should we? Is that a productive use of HN?
The single objective measure you referred to is battery life, to which professionals have actual repeatable, regimented tests. You don't. Your statement on it is irrelevant.
