The point is that there are already over a hundred million Android devices in use in Africa, with projections for smartphones as a whole for 154 million mobile connections. This of course excludes some devices without connectivity, and it does include some very low end devices.
But even if the number of devices that are advanced enough to run these apps were to only make up 20 million of those projected 154 million today, it's still clear that if these apps were available for Android, a huge number of people would be able to run them without any additional investment in hardware.
Expect those numbers to grow at a dramatic rate over the next couple of years, and the specs to steadily increase - keep in mind that there are African countries that can be expected to reach full saturation of mobile phone connections within the next few years, and while smartphones and tablets are lagging, smartphones at least is rapidly eating into the feature phone market in Africa too.
If iPad's works best for them for the deployments where they pay for hardware, then so be it (though I must say I don't believe it, because of the huge cost differential between decent low end Android hardware and iPads), but at the same time they are self-limiting to an extremely small subset of the devices that are actually in peoples hands, and their own deployments will be a rounding error compared to elswhere.
(even in the UK, where the linked research was done, limiting to iPad's excludes the majority of potential users)
> Specially because somebody is cash deprived is why the one with most quality, most durable, more long-lasting life is the smart choose
That is only true if 1) the higher quality option is cheap enough to be possible to afford at any point. It doesn't help if it's better if you can't obtain it. 2) the cost of repeated replacement of a lower quality option exceeds the cost of the higher quality option, including the opportunity cost incurred by paying much more upfront for the higher quality device.
This also means that there may very well be very different cost/benefit tradeoffs for a charity vs. someone paying out of their own pocket.
> because we don't have money for replacement
You can get a decent quality Android tablet in the $40-$50 range (AllWinner A23 or A13 based dual core tablet with Android 4.2 and 16GB flash; 7" 800x600 screen; these are no speed daemons but they are good enough to stream video and play a decent portion of 3D games etc; double that and you can start to find devices with IPS displays in the 1280x720 range) even before you start looking at volume discounts. If you don't have enough money for replacement that may just as well be because you chose an extremely high cost device to begin with.
Yes, you sacrifice quality. Yet my son seems to decide whether to use his 7" low end Android tablet or his moms iPad Air based on which game he wants to play, not on the device.
But even if the number of devices that are advanced enough to run these apps were to only make up 20 million of those projected 154 million today, it's still clear that if these apps were available for Android, a huge number of people would be able to run them without any additional investment in hardware.
Expect those numbers to grow at a dramatic rate over the next couple of years, and the specs to steadily increase - keep in mind that there are African countries that can be expected to reach full saturation of mobile phone connections within the next few years, and while smartphones and tablets are lagging, smartphones at least is rapidly eating into the feature phone market in Africa too.
If iPad's works best for them for the deployments where they pay for hardware, then so be it (though I must say I don't believe it, because of the huge cost differential between decent low end Android hardware and iPads), but at the same time they are self-limiting to an extremely small subset of the devices that are actually in peoples hands, and their own deployments will be a rounding error compared to elswhere.
(even in the UK, where the linked research was done, limiting to iPad's excludes the majority of potential users)
> Specially because somebody is cash deprived is why the one with most quality, most durable, more long-lasting life is the smart choose
That is only true if 1) the higher quality option is cheap enough to be possible to afford at any point. It doesn't help if it's better if you can't obtain it. 2) the cost of repeated replacement of a lower quality option exceeds the cost of the higher quality option, including the opportunity cost incurred by paying much more upfront for the higher quality device.
This also means that there may very well be very different cost/benefit tradeoffs for a charity vs. someone paying out of their own pocket.
> because we don't have money for replacement
You can get a decent quality Android tablet in the $40-$50 range (AllWinner A23 or A13 based dual core tablet with Android 4.2 and 16GB flash; 7" 800x600 screen; these are no speed daemons but they are good enough to stream video and play a decent portion of 3D games etc; double that and you can start to find devices with IPS displays in the 1280x720 range) even before you start looking at volume discounts. If you don't have enough money for replacement that may just as well be because you chose an extremely high cost device to begin with.
Yes, you sacrifice quality. Yet my son seems to decide whether to use his 7" low end Android tablet or his moms iPad Air based on which game he wants to play, not on the device.