I am increasingly surprised that anyone bothers to make Android apps.
I have a successful kids app on iOS that I recently ported to Android. The Android version made 5% of what the iOS version made last month.
If rankings are anything to go by then virtually nobody can be making money from paid Android apps. During its first week, my app peaked at 50 sales in one day on the Amazon app store. That put it at #120 of ALL PAID APPS and #3 in kids apps just under some Dora app. The app is now idling around #400 of all paid apps with around 10 sales a day. By way of comparison, I need to sell around 100 copies a day to break into the top 400 of all paid apps in the US on just the iPad rankings.
So, from a purely financial perspective, why are people writing Android apps?
For a while, Rovio postponed making a paid version of Angry Birds for Android because ad revenue * free players was much higher than app price * paying players.
Also, a lot of the apps I use on Android are "companion" apps for services or web apps that I already use. Eye-Fi, Smugmug, Mint, Facebook, Pandora, Tweetdeck, etc.
So based on 1 data (from your own app), your conclusion is that it is not worth building apps on Android in spite of more than a 100 million devices out there.
Is it possible there are already established apps on Android in your category?
Do you think it would be different if you actually ported your app at least a year ago?
Are you really trying to argue that the Amazon app store offers a comparison to the iOS app store? Do you have numbers for the performance on Google Play?
You stated in another response that your app was targeted at 2-8 year olds. I'm not sure that target audience is a good base of comparison between Android and iOS.
My 7 year old daughter has an iPod and she get's iTunes points for gifts. I am NOT however, going to give her an Android Phone. Until there is an Android version of the iPod and a way to buy gift cards for market purchases, I don't see the under ~15 market being lucrative in the Android space.
EDIT: I would also bet that 100% of your sales on the Amazon market are from Kindle Fire users. THOSE are the only small form factor Android devices that are cheap enough to give to children, thus your success there.
On Android it is usually better to make the app free and use advertising to make money, with eg Admob or AppBrain AppLift ( http://www.appbrain.com/info/developers)
Do any other developers find this somewhat distasteful? I mean obviously the goal of selling software is to make money, but for me personally I just don't like the idea of carefully crafting a nice looking and useful application and then slapping a bunch of advertisements on top of it.
That "apart from a purely financial perspective" went full loop there. Because apart from a purely financial perspective why do people create apps for any plat at all ? Would the reasons be shared by plat or are you expecting to probe the "other side" with this exploratory question that puts money out of the equation.
You are also extrapolating a lot while not providing basic information for; number of kids on each plat, age of buyers on each plat that went and got your app, etc. That would help bring perspective to your anecdotal example and provide basic input about what sort of market it is that you are trying to analyze.
Myself, I write some software that runs on Android. Mostly Biz Intel and Rich Media deployed from servers that runs on Android enabled smartphone running clients, so none of the App Store experience here, but I like to develop for it because it is something I genuinely love to do. And the money is good too.
Wait...Amazon App Store? So you didn't put it in Google's Play Store, too? There are roughly 60x more users with access to the Play store than Amazon Appstore. I don't know what you have heard about Amazon's app store - probably that is more "efficient" at making money "per app" than Google's Play Store, but Amazon has a much smaller user base. We're basically comparing 350 million users (Android) to 5 million users (Amazon).
Also, if you do port it on the "real" Android and the Play Store, you should try an ad-supported free version, too. The problem with paid apps on Android is that Google doesn't have a very large Checkout/Wallet user base, and it's a huge obstacle for people who don't have this account to make it right then for a single app that they may want. They are building the userbase now with ICS, since they are asking everyone to sign-up for it, but ICS only has a 7% market share so far, so it will take a while until everyone has Android 4+.
It's also worth noting that if his app is relevant to non-US customers, there are more than a few regional app stores worth looking at. Not to mention the Nook Store (B&N had better children's books than Amazon for quite some time, so that might be an important market for a kids app).
I don't see anywhere in the original flurry report, what is the number of ios and Android apps using their service. Shouldn't this relevant information be clear somewhere? What if there are just more.people who chose to use flurry for ios? I'm an Android dev and haven't even heard of them before.
At my work we use Flurry on iOS and Google Analytics on Android. I'm not sure how common this scenario is but it seems likely to me that Flurry is just less popular on Android relative to iOS.
Flurry is very popular also on Android. About 6.5% of all apps, and 28% of the top 500 Android apps use it. See here for more details: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev
Google Analytics is in 6.9% of Android apps. For an Android library this means it is quite widely used, since there are only two more popular libraries. (Admob SDK (34%) and the Facebook SDK (7.5%))
And what about iOS? If iOS is 13%, wouldn't that explain the 2:1 ratio? Even if we're talking "growth", the growth for Flurry's own business could be higher on iOS, maybe because they did more marketing on iOS, or more word of mouth between iOS devs - who knows.
I think Microsoft took a really interesting strategy for enticing developers to come develop for the platform. Rather than hold a $1M prize competition (a la Android), they went in a similar direction to the offerings that RIM used for the playbook.
Instead of just giving away a device though, Microsoft really gamified the experience by offering several different prizes (including pre-paid credit cards) and tiers based on the number of apps developed. I think this really helped draw the college crowd in.
They also approached individual companies who have successful applications on other platforms and offered to pay them large good amounts of money to develop for the platform.
It seems like throwing all that money around really did work out for them in the end :).
Google could've really used a similar approach for tablet apps. I find Google's lack of attention towards Android tablet apps very frustrating. It's one of the main reasons, if not the main reason why Android tablets are generally still not considered very good competitors to the iPad. And if the situation really is better than we think its, then they are doing a very poor job at promoting it. This, plus the botched launch of Honeycomb and the expensive tablets running it, really hurt the momentum for Android tablets, and they are still suffering for it.
Google needs to learn how to do launches properly, and they should keep in mind that developer support from day one is extremely important. Apple had like 2000 apps for the iPad in the first days or weeks after launch, because they announced the tablet 2 months ahead, and made the SDK available right away, too. And made the iPhone developers very excited about porting their apps to the iPad. In contrast, Google released the SDK like literally a day before the Motorola Xoom launched (which cost $800 at launch - another extremely dumb move. Asus Transformer was $400 a few months later, and a better device, too), and then everyone started talking about the lack of tablet apps on Honeycomb. Would it have killed them to get the developer support before launch, like Apple? I get really frustrated when I see Google making obvious mistake after obvious mistake like this.
I sold my Galaxy Tab 10.1 to buy an iPad 3 when they came out, mainly because of the lack of tablet-optimized apps. 9 months into owning it the app situation wasn't any better than on day one, and I gave up.
At least as of mid-March, Google didn't even have a tablet-optimized version of the Google+ app. It was still just a stretched version of the phone view, just like most every other Android app on a tablet would look.
If G+ is supposedly the hub of Google's product strategy going forward, and G+ doesn't have a good experience on tablets, it makes me wonder if they really even care at all about the tablet platform at all.
looking at the actual announcement from flurry.com, it seems that the company does not have any data indicating what platforms developers build Apps for.
They just know how popular their own SDK is on both platforms.
There are many reasons of course why flurry could be more popular on iOS than on Android: What SDK was available first? how is it advertised? how well does the competition do?
On Android, flurry competes with Google Analytics, which Google advertises in the Android documentation, developer blog and support pages.
Similar misleading is when they write about "Fragmentation". They list a long list of different devices that their customer's apps are running on. But they have no idea if developers run into any issues when supporting these many devices. How is it fragmentation if you can target many devices and operating systems with a single code base? Isn't this more like the opposite of fragmentation?
There is no doubt that iOS is more lucrative than Android for many classes of apps, but come on: who takes these Flurry reports seriously?
Flurry pimps an analytics tool that is very popular on iOS, less popular on Android. Their intrinsic bias towards iOS, reflecting this, is amply evident by the narrative they add every time they release these trolling "studies" of laughable methodology (100% of the women married to me think I'm the best, therefore 100% of women think I'm the best) -- their disdain for Android, and pandering to iOS, could not be more evident.
Let's just look at the gross numbers -- if 4x more developers are building for iOS, based upon Flurry being implemented in apps, then the iOS App Store will be growing by 4x the pace. Is that true? I'll let the reader discern, but add the subtle hint that...ha ha...no, not even close.
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I have a successful kids app on iOS that I recently ported to Android. The Android version made 5% of what the iOS version made last month.
If rankings are anything to go by then virtually nobody can be making money from paid Android apps. During its first week, my app peaked at 50 sales in one day on the Amazon app store. That put it at #120 of ALL PAID APPS and #3 in kids apps just under some Dora app. The app is now idling around #400 of all paid apps with around 10 sales a day. By way of comparison, I need to sell around 100 copies a day to break into the top 400 of all paid apps in the US on just the iPad rankings.
So, from a purely financial perspective, why are people writing Android apps?