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Some Claim Android App Store Worse Than iPhone's
eldavojohn writes "If you think the iPhone app store is the only mobile game store suffering an exodus, some game publishers claim Android's app store isn't much better, for a different reason — it doesn't generate much revenue. In fact, French game developer Gameloft (which owes 13% of its profits to iPhone game sales), said, 'We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like... many others. It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue. We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android.' So the trade-off seems to be more sales but an annoying approval process, versus a lack of sales promotions and no annoyance around approval. It seems that those in it for money will opt for iPhone, and those in it for distribution will opt for Android. Or maybe someone will get it right one of these days?"
But I still say eat which ever you personally like.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Sure, if porting over was free... But the reality is that porting an iPhone app to Android requires moving all your iPhone C code to Java, targeting non multitouch devices, targeting devices with different screen sizes and resolutions, and another round of testing... You'd have to hire a second engineering team. What Gameloft seems to be saying is they can hire a dozen engineers to make X number of dollars on Android, or they can take those same engineers and make 400 times X on the iPhone. Economically, it makes no sense for them to keep engineers on Android when those same engineers could be put to work to make 400 times as much money on the iPhone.
With the Droid out and the recent marketing push in terms of Verizon dollars behind it I think this might look a little different down the road a bit.
There are a lot fewer Android phones than iPhones, plus there is one thing people forget:
If you distribute code for Apple's platform, you have to go through the App Store. If you want to distribute code for Windows Mobile and Android, you can just send the user a file. The Android and WM app stores are more of clearinghouses (similar to Handango), as opposed to a central choke point.
So, factoring out pirated apps, Apple's Store shows essentially all the apps that go from developers to customers. Other platforms, the app stores might be used for commercial distribution, but other apps don't need to be. So, even if Android had the same marketshare as Apple's ther app store would always show fewer apps because people are free to use other ways to get from them to their users.