Personally I view this as bad news for the Android ecosystem.
The iOS/iTunes ecosystem is incredibly accessible. You don't need a credit card (important for minors; a huge market). You can buy credit everywhere. iOS users seem willing to part with cash.
Google Checkout on the other hand is not available everywhere Android is. People seem less willing to use it (eg 50k paid from this post). You can't buy credit in the retail chain. Google gives developers 95%.
The last one is actually a huge problem. Google's 5% will never pay for retail distribution (Apple's 30% clearly does).
Developers have come to the obvious conclusion: they'd rather have 70% of (potentially) a lot rather than 95% of much less.
iOS has the option of paid and ad-supported. Android only having ad-supported (realistically) is a major disadvantage.
The only way Abgry Birds could make it to Android is on the back of the success of iOS. I wonder how much money their experiment is really making.
Not according to my Google account, it's the same 70% as Apple. Although I have heard that Google gives most of their 30% share to mobile carriers, which troubles me; I really don't like the user-hostile carriers profiting from my work.
Android only having ad-supported (realistically)
That's not the case at all. With zero marketing my paid app makes in the high hundreds of dollars per month (after Google's cut), which from my understanding is much better than the median iOS app. Yes, there are plenty of things Google should be doing better with the market, but it's far from impossible to make decent money with paid apps.
I wonder how much money their experiment is really making.
A minor point: outside the US, Android prices are listed as (some examples from featured apps):
~CA$1.96
~CA$5.08
~CA$3.05
~CA$1.01
It's completely irrational, but I actually find myself less willing to buy for "untidy" prices. I didn't fully understand why Apple has its tiered pricing system, but now I do.
That's relatively new, but I was glad when they changed it. To be clear, it's not "outside the US", that's Canada -- the point is that prices are now listed in local currency, including in the US.
Back to the point: while I'm pretty comfortable with translating Canadian dollars, British Pounds, or Euros to US dollars, that's about as much as I can do in my head. I'm much happier seeing ~US$1.17 than ¥99, and I'm much more likely to buy the app.
So while I can see your point, I think it was definitely a change for the better, and it probably resulted in increased sales.
I think the point was that iOS apps have a set of fixed prices in each area (in local currency). Here in the UK the cheapest non-free app is 59p (corresponding with a 99c app in the US store), the next is £1.19 ($1.99), and so on. This makes for a better user experience because people can think in terms of the price brackets.
Huh, that's odd. My algorithm is "if x < 5: buy()". Presumably the apps I want to buy are all apps I need, so less than $5 is quite well into the "no brainer" category.
Google checkout is the thing keeping me from buying apps. I've been close to buying apps a few times, but then I have to go through the hassle of setting up a Google checkout account on my phone and decide that it's not worth it just for some app.
What Google really should to if they want to get people buying apps is to make a deal with the carriers so that apps I buy show up on my phone bill. If they did that then there would be no barrier at all for anyone to buying apps and I no doubt would have bought several by now.
1) You don't have to set up Google Checkout on your phone, you can do it from any computer with a browser and web access. (Your phone is already associated with your Google account, so once your Google account has Google Checkout details set up, you're good to go.)
2) Carrier billing was enabled for T-Mobile several months ago. My understanding is that it will be coming to other carriers as well.
I second the first point. When I got my Android phone, all I had to do to buy an app is press "buy" and then "confirm". No credit cards or anything, it was already set up.
Isn't the only thing you have to do to enter your credit card? I did it recently to buy one app, and I don't remember it to be especially painful or complicated.
The problem with Google Checkout compared to PayPal is that only people with a Checkout account can buy from places that require Checkout. It's not the job of a vendor to get their customers to sign up with Checkout. It's hard enough to get the to agree to buy something. That extra hurdle is just too much.
When you buy from Apple, you buy using Apple's checkout process. Why ever would anyone think that Android would use anything but Google's checkout process?
iPads and iPods require the use of iTunes which pretty much requires an account. You have to do this in order to use the devices. Apple pretty much has a system that once you are using their devices you've got an account. So when a user is searching for apps they've already got an account. There is no extra hurdle at that stage.
I'm not 100% sure this is still the case, but I recall not being able to buy apps on iTunes using gift card credit a year or two back. I got the impression it had something to do with the way that software is taxed in Canada (Ontario specifically)—music and gift cards weren't taxed, but apps were.
So as far as I'm aware, you do need a credit card to buy apps, at least in Ontario.
I think you could probably just create some random numbers, put them on cards (for example at moo.com, or something like a scratchcard) and sell them in a shop. Then set your Android app in such a way that to unlock the non-demo version, you have to enter the code from a scratchcard.
I really don't want to come across as a troll or mean, but I don't know how to word this in any way that probably will not. Did you even think about the logistics of your comment?
Apple is able to sell iTunes cards in retail stores because they operate the store that the cards are redeemed at. The monetary value of the card does not change from the price I pay for it at my local grocery store and the amount I am able to redeem from the online store. I can buy that card and buy any app with the value of that card.
If a third party was to create a similar system for Android it would be horribly broken. I don't even want to give any scenarios because there are thousands to describe how unmanageable and frustrating any system would end up being for end-users, from activation codes being incompatible between apps to apps not having redeeming capabilities built into them.
Google would have to start its own system to deal with store credits. I would rather they start fixing the problems developers have been complaining about for a while than try to implement additional features in an already un-polished (broken, dare I say?) system.
I'd love to know how many active installs there are of those 7M downloads. I must have downloaded it 3 times to my devices and it didn't successfully run on any of them.
We have an app with over 1.2M downloads and around 500k active installs. I think the active install rate is low because it is a LITE version. Only - I haven't put ads on the game yet, and have been wondering whether it's worth it or not. If it only makes a little per day, then I'd rather just leave my free users alone and stick with the paid upgrade.
I'd also like to know what kind of revenue they are making from ads on Android. I feel like if we made our game completely free, we'd reach over 2-3M downloads pretty quickly and triple our active install rate, and if that meant we were making as much in ads as paid downloads, then I think we'd consider going that direction. It's just too big of a maybe, and we can't seem to get any inside info about ad revenues to make the leap - even when emailing Mobclix and Admob, we get no response to this question.
Worst of all - I wonder if we are leaving money on the table by not being an ad supported app.
You raise the single greatest most valid point yet! It's not about those who download it and try it. It's about stickiness. Now, Angry Birds apparently has its fans (I'm not one just because I find the whole genre bland) but I know from experience that I'll down lite versions on my iPhone, often ad supported, try them out, and maybe purchase 5% of them as full, ad-free versions. The rest get dumped off the phone. Same goes with XBLA (Xbox) games. I've downed many trials but purchased only 1.
It's all about live installs... not just downloads.
The free version is VERY limited however. So, going from 10% of a game to 100% would hopefully sway the reviews my way even with ads, but still - hard to say.
I could start slow, with just ads on the home screen, then maybe put them throughout.
This seems to say really bad things for the Android marketplace. If a game as good and popular as Angry Birds can't survive if charged for, it doesn't seem like a good place for developers. Ad supported doesn't work unless you can get to millions of downloads.
Something the article doesn't keep in consideration is the fact that Angry Birds is so famous that most likely those people on Android who downloaded it have seen their iPhone friends playing it and praising it for months...
I have the game on my android phone and like it, so I put it on my wife's new ipod touch. I am amazed at how much better the graphics and gameplay seem to be on her ipod. The graphics seem much more detailed, and the controls seem more responsive.
Weird; I had the opposite experience when I played it for a few minutes on my friend's iPhone 4. The graphics were strangely inferior on the iPhone compared to my Nexus One. This surprised me, because I thought it was mostly an iPhone game and that Rovio viewed Android as just a secondary market.
Is your Android device not quite top of the line? I read recently that Rovio felt that they'd aimed a bit high with their required specs, and that they would focus on increasing performance on mid-range devices in the near future.
Byte code vs native code? I have a hard time believing that anyone would make an Android game without the NDK (without which you're basically CPU starved - Android isn't the platform for heavy CPU work), but maybe Angry Birds is Dalvik-only?
I have it on good authority[1] that Angry Birds is a native-inclusive app. Also, I wouldn't look down my nose at Dalvik-only apps. The JIT (which, AFAIK, is the target of the litigation) gets pretty close to optimal code the longer it runs - and theoretically games run the same code a lot more than your average application.
In fact, my EUR0.02 is that native-inclusive apps (just like any Java apps which rely on native libraries) are worse, in my opinion, because it limits the number of platforms that one can execute the apps upon. And as a huge Linux fan, current Mac user, and user of x64 Windows at work, I can assure you that I get left out in the cold a LOT.
It's one level of bad to tie your app only to Windows, which coincidentally includes 90% (last metric I heard) of the world. It's another thing entirely to say, "oh, sorry, your Android isn't the same as my Android: too bad for you."
Also, I wouldn't look down my nose at Dalvik-only apps. The JIT (which, AFAIK, is the target of the litigation) gets pretty close to optimal code the longer it runs - and theoretically games run the same code a lot more than your average application
That's interesting - are you sure about that? There's a big difference between a static translation JIT and the more modern and memory-intensive progressively-optimizing JIT's that are used outside mobile. My understanding was that Dalvik's JIT was a one-time-only translater. Its difficult to find any comprehensive benchmarks of the 2.2 JIT - there are plenty of benchmarks showing the 2.1 interpreter eating CPU cycles compared to native code (think 20-to-1), and Google themselves claimed that the 2.2 JIT would mean a 2-5x improvement in CPU efficiency, but I'm still waiting for a set of comprehensive cross-platform benchmarks.
What is your Android phone? I've played the game on my Nexus One and on an iPhone 4, and I find the experience close to identical. The iPhone 4 without argue has a GPU that absolutely trounces the Nexus One -- though it is matched in the Galaxy S, Desire Z, and close to matched in the Moto Droid 2 variations -- however Angry Birds doesn't really exercise the limits of it so that doesn't come into play.
So presuming that you're talking about the "Full" version, and considering that there is no lite version, I'm curious how such a difference of perceptions could possibly be.
This is neither here nor there, but I'm wondering if anyone else has an opinion on this: Does anyone find the physics in Angry Birds INCREDIBLY frustrating? There seems to be very little rhyme or reason to the way momentum is transferred. And the material modeling just makes me want to bite my tongue off.
I've heard this complaint before, and it puzzles me. Figuring out the odd physical rules (to manipulate them) is almost the entirety of the game. If you don't enjoy the physics, then you don't enjoy the game, but blaming the physics for your non-enjoyment is like criticizing Pac-Man because you die when you run into a ghost.
I don't believe that this is intrinsically correct. Part of what makes I feel makes a game good or not is if the rules are consistent and can be extrapolated.
If every action is a special case, the game is frustrating to any player trying to build a mental model of the cause and effect relationships within the world.
Now on the other hand, the premise of a game and it's basic interactions may be enjoyable, or at least conceptually enjoyable, by themselves. There need not be the call for the player to accept the gestalt as it is.
Personally, I'd like to see an Angry Birds clone that made it a little easier to understand what's going to happen when you launch a game object in a particular way.
Inconsistency can certainly break a game, but where's the inconsistency in Angry Birds?
I've got three stars on every level through the first ten worlds, and only a couple of levels seemed to require lucky breaks for maximum points. 3-1 was the one time I gave up and found the three-star solution on youtube.
Rovo could easily release a paid version without ads. It's practically ancient tradition on the iPhone, which everyone is arguing is completely different to the Android market. I just assumed that Rovo must be making more money from ads than they ever could from sales. In what order did Rovo release versions for alternate platforms? I would be interested in knowing whether there was a point where they started preferring ad-support.
From an UI perspective I really hate the ads in angry birds on android: the advertised products are never interesting and the ad is placed in a way that it can be accidentally tapped during gameplay (happened to me multiple times).
I would GLADLY pay to get the ads to go away. Maybe they should add a premium, ad-free, version
And as lots of people have already pointed out, an ad-free version would be pirated instantly. This way they make some money out of the Android user base.
Personally I suspect that once the hive mind gets to work even ads will stop working and Android will simply not have any commercial-grade software whatsoever.
"Because it makes more money that way" is the short answer. While this explains why they have a free version, it doesn't explain why they don't have a paid version as well. There are plenty of people who would pay $.99 to remove ads. Piracy is the only explanation for this that comes to mind.
I think Rovio is putting all their weight into turning Angry Birds into a global brand.
The mobile app market is still pretty limited. Getting beyond $10 million revenue over all is incredible but nobody has any experience on sustaining success in the mobile market in the long run.
Investing in the brand, on the other had, gives Rovio a lot more options - licensing deals, a movie deal or whatever. It is a tried and tested model.
If Rovio got 7 million extra fans and alot of free media coverage by releasing it for free on Android, that in itself might be a better deal than a half a million in revenue from sales, even if you don't count the advertising revenue.
The iOS/iTunes ecosystem is incredibly accessible. You don't need a credit card (important for minors; a huge market). You can buy credit everywhere. iOS users seem willing to part with cash.
Google Checkout on the other hand is not available everywhere Android is. People seem less willing to use it (eg 50k paid from this post). You can't buy credit in the retail chain. Google gives developers 95%.
The last one is actually a huge problem. Google's 5% will never pay for retail distribution (Apple's 30% clearly does).
Developers have come to the obvious conclusion: they'd rather have 70% of (potentially) a lot rather than 95% of much less.
iOS has the option of paid and ad-supported. Android only having ad-supported (realistically) is a major disadvantage.
The only way Abgry Birds could make it to Android is on the back of the success of iOS. I wonder how much money their experiment is really making.