Millions of Android users are still using older and uglier versions of the OS. Couple with the fact that many of those Android apps tend to suck compared to iOS versions, as you can see here in this video, and it's easy to see why Apple is blowing away Android with up to 90% of all app revenues!
When it comes to Android apps it's not just a case of iOS having more of them, but higher quality ones to boot as the above video clearly demonstrates. In fact, even one ex-Googler has admitted that when it comes to the perfomance of Android apps, well they will never probably never run as smooth as those for similar iOS versions. Apparently, when it comes to developing for Android developers prefer iOS not just because it's more profitable, but because it's a lot easier to develop for as well.
According to this blogger, developing for Android sucks because:
"It is more expensive. It takes more time to test, and special case for so many different devices and different capabilities. All the assumptions you get for free with iOS go out the window on Android. This adds up to buying more devices for testing, more development hours and more testing hours.
Even if you build something that works great on most versions of Android, you can’t prevent people from installing your app on a unsupported device, or an older version of the OS. And then they have the nerve to leave bad reviews. It sucks to put all that work into something and then get a bad review from someone with a device you didn’t test or intend to support.
Google and the Android app store doesn't support shared accounts. The developer builds your app and submits it (yay), but then you want to login and see the how many downloads you have. Too bad you can’t.
Android users don’t seem to like to pay for apps. If you have a free app, that’s great – but where most iPhone users will gladly fork over $0.99, Android users don’t have that same tendency, making it much harder to monetize your hard work."
Unfortunately, as bad as Android apps for mobile phones suck in comparison to the iPhone versions go, well it's a lot suckier when it comes to tablet versions of Android apps. The situation is so bad, in fact, that one of tech's biggest sites, PC World, wrote a post that stated that: The iPad Wins Because Android Tablet Apps Suck: An Illustrated Guide.
Sascha Segan wrote in his post above that the first big problem was simply finding Android tablet apps in the first place! iOS has over 120,000 high-quality apps written just for the iPad, plus another 430,000 plus phone apps that run on it as well! Android, in comparison, only has a few hundred tablet apps.
Another problem with Android table apps is that they are just 'plain ugly' according to the author, and he states:
"Way too many Android apps fall back on a design that looks like a late-20th-century WAP site: a stack of modules designed to look good on narrow screens. Unfortunately, that design is completely inappropriate for a tablet."
You can see his list comparison of Android and iOS apps here.
Responding to Sascha's post, another writer, Joshua Howland, wrote:
"Simple fact: developers want money.
The tablet market is going to be driven in large part by the developers. The applications on the devices are what make them useful to our individual needs. Not to sound like Phil Schiller, but Android developers aren’t making tablet apps, they’re just blowing up phone apps.
It doesn’t matter that users don’t want blown up apps. It doesn’t matter that users want apps developed specifically for a tablet sized device. It’s not worth the developers time to develop a full tablet version of their Android app."
Even though Android, or Windows 8, tablets may be able to compete with the iPad on the hardware side of the equation, no specific hardware, and no matter how good it is, or even if it's better than the iPad, it's still rather useless with out great apps to take advantage of that hardward. For this reason alone, and just three iPads later, CNN's, Julianne Pepitone, wrote:
"..... other tablets are still dead on arrival."
In conclusion, and in consideration of the above problems associated with Android on the app side of things, is it any wonder that there is a need for a site called: Android Gripes?
And that's my 2 cents 4 this Thursday, March 28, 2012
Opening Android graphic via: Techchunks
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