Found two great pieces of info today. The first statistic explains part of the problem that Android developers are having monetizing their apps compared to their iOS compatriots. According to Fierce Mobile Content, which is quoting a research report from Allot Communications,
The question is will Google’s slow but steady way match Apple’s huge head start in mobile?
Google and Apple have very different business models where mobile is concerned. Apple makes their money selling hardware. Google makes their money displaying ads. Apple can change more for their hardware if it is exclusive to them. Google makes more money if they can expand their reach. This is a lesson that Apple is well-aware of.
The latest from Bloomberg is that iAds are selling at steep discounts to what they were at launch. We talking 50 to 70% off. Everyone agrees that advertisers are not interested in high costs, just results. iAds is also at a disadvantage in that they only target Apple devices. Google does not care if its ads are displayed on its Android platform or Apple’s iOS or Blackberry or anywhere else. It just cares about the quality of the ad and the user’s interaction. This different attitude puts Google more in line with the advertiser.
Apple iAds can certainly come back, as long as the customer come first.
Developers at the Informal Android Developer Meetup occasionally ask about the future of Android,especially in comparison to iPhone. The latest news shows that Google’s efforts and Android’s open source programming are paying off. Third party counts of the apps on the Android Market peg the number at 50K, which is quite a nice boost from the 40K or so apps on it last month. The iPhone apps still number around 200K, but many of these apps are probably being converted right now.
The number of iPhone devices are three, the iPhone, the iTouch, and the new iPad. Currently, there are 36 devices running Android. Forecasts have said that there will be about 50 Android devices released this year, about 1 a week, which will keep Android developers busy.
The future of Android looks bright. I have always thought of iPhone as a cell phone on training wheels. It taught people, especially Americans, how to use a smartphone and the potential that smartphones had. Now that people are familiar with smartphones, they can graduate to more advanced smartphones that fit their personalities. We are seeing the past playing out again. Like the PC vs. Mac arguments, the open nature of the Android OS will result in a large number of devices that have a wide range of capabilites and prices. The closed nature of the iPhone will result in a beautiful, well-thought out device that is extremely expensive compared to others and slowly adds new features.
A Japanese blogger who goes by Nobi shared his views on whether Apple’s iPhone is a success or not in Japan. He was too polite to say so directly but comparing Apple’s marketing to George W. Bush’s policies sounds pretty negative.
Fierce Developer posted an interesting piece on another blog’s post. Specifically, a professional iPhone developer crunched the numbers on how much money was involved in putting together a really complex iPhone app and determined that it was completely unworkable with the $0.99 apps crowding out the expensive apps. With over 10,000 apps now, the store is already pretty crowded.
I look at this development as just another software cycle in the life of a new platform. After all, the apps are becoming more complicated because the software and interfaces are getting easier to program and to interface. At the same time the market is growing. These complex programs that require several manhours and $100,000 would have required several times the effort and money just a couple of years ago. They would have been almost impossible to get enough of a market to make the development worth the cost.
Even today in the life of the PC, free software is everywhere, but people still buy complex, expensive software when it is justified by the price and usefulness. After all, Oracle sells multimillion dollar databases even though there are many high quality free database easily available.
In a related story, the iPhone apps store was just about the only site that actively advertised that you could get iPhone apps at their store. Oh, sure. There were sites where jailbroken phones could get apps, but those don’t count. Now the monopoly has been shaken by Mobile Distillery, which is heavily promoting their site to developers. But will they come?
