Is Choice a Problem For Android?

New submitter mjone13 writes "Dave Feldman, in a blog posts, says that the problem Android faces is giving consumers too much choice. He cites several studies which state that consumers generally are unhappier when they have too much choice. 'Catering to all individual preferences creates a bloated, bland product. Not to mention a UI that’s impossible to navigate. Furthermore, people are notoriously bad at identifying what we want. And what we do want is influenced heavily by what we know — our expectations are constrained by our experience.' He then goes on to talk about Android fragmentation, app developer problems and bug issues. Finally he says the people who general prefer the choice Android provides are tinkers similar to gear heads who love tinkering with their car. 'I think many who extol Android’s flexibility fall into the tinkerer category, including some tech bloggers. They love all the ways they can customize their phones, not because they’re seeking some perfect setup, but because they can swap in a new launcher every week. That’s fun for them; but they’ve made the mistake of not understanding how their motivation differs from the rest of us.' Is choice really a problem for Android?" Whether it's a problem depends on what the goals are. Providing a satisfying experience to a bunch of tinkerers is a very different thing from providing a satisfying experience to the multitude of non-tinkerers who buy smartphones.

Comments

Re:choice doesn't *require* bad defaults

[master_kaos]

I do development for ios and android. 85% of our downloads are on apple, 15% on android. We are a small shop so we are not going to go out and buy every device to test it on. Generally our apps are ok with most android devices, but there will always be one specific type of device that the app will crash on because it does something a little differently.

Not to mention all of the different versions, you have people running everything from 2.1 to the latest version. For our app on android 63% are running 4.0.3+, however 31% are running 2.3 so we can't abandon 2.x yet. With iOS you generally only care about previous version. So currently target for 6.1 or higher, if you REALLY want to squeeze out every last download stat you can, aim for 5.1 (since ipad 1 can't upgrade to ios 6)
http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/ I find these statistics fairly accurate. Since we don't use any ios6 features we target 5.1+.

One of my cousins is a product manager at a medium sized mobile gaming company, he said they have a similar experience to ours. Their games download stats are about 10-20% android rest iOS, yet they spend 3x the resources on android support as they have about 90 devices laying around to test on, and people always calling up because "it runs slow on this device", "it crashes on this device". They completely killed android development except for their top couple apps

Re:choice doesn't *require* bad defaults

[ducomputergeek]

A lot depends on who and what you are targeting. If eyeballs and advertising is what you after supporting Android is a must. But if you are after in-app purchases as your revenue model, it's iOS you want.

I've been developing mobile apps since 2009. Early on I was making as much off ad revenue vs app purchases, but by last year the ad revenue went in the crapper. So much so that I stopped releasing updates for android. By that time Android accounted for a little over 60% of the installs. It accounted for less than 15% of my revenues. Android accounted for over 90% of my complaints and requests for support because someone with a cheap pay-as-you-go android phone would run into a problem on a device I didn't even know existed. I was making at most a couple thousand a month from the apps, mostly from iOS users. It was enough that it paid my basic living expenses like rent & utilities meaning my day job work could go into savings. But it wasn't enough for me to go out and buy every freaking handset on the market at $600 a pop.

Now on the professional day job part of the world we usually price for iOS first and includes QA for current generation and usually the previous 2 generations before that. Right now if you paid us to write an app, we'd ensure compatibility with the iPhone 4, 4s, 5 & iPad 2, Retina, Mini. Next month it will likely be 5S/C, 5, 4S & iPad Retina, Mini, + whatever is announced next week.

For Android we will test against Nexus Phone & Tablet and certify QA with those devices only and it costs our clients about 1.5xiOS. Why? Because we know we'll be answering "QA for XYZ handset was not covered in the contract" a few times. So we build it into the price of the contract. We do offer QA for additional handsets & tablets @ $5,000 per Android handset/tablet. Most of our clients will maybe ask for QA against the latest Samsung Galaxy devices and that's it. Only one that I can think of asked for Samsung & Motorola because the boss man had a motorola phone.

When Android first started we tried to QA against as many handsets as we could and we were losing money on those contracts. When Google released their official devices we decided, even though nobody used them in the mass market, those would be what we'd test against. That was the "official" devices for compatibility. What handset makers & carriers did beyond that we'd have to charge extra to fix because we'd run into the same model android phone would have odd quirks between different carriers sometimes.