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I try my best to avoid writing sensational headlines for my pieces here.1 I slipped, though, with my piece on the differences between the Android and iOS app markets two weeks ago. “Where Are the Android Killer Apps?” was too broad. It implies there are no third-party “killer apps” for Android, period. That’s not true, and it distracted from the point I was trying to make.
A better headline for that piece would have been, “Where Are the iOS-Style Killer Apps for Android?” That gets to the heart of my argument.
In my piece, I wrote:
Mark Pilgrim tweeted:
One fundamental difference between the two is that Android allows third-party software to change the system itself in certain ways. You can add components that show up in standard menus across the system. There’s a standard “do something with this URL” menu, for example. Third parties can add items to that menu, very much like how you can add system-wide Services in Mac OS X. Third parties can also replace the Android home screen, and replace the touchscreen keyboard. There are lots of Swype fans out there.
So lots of Android fans argue, with merit, that most of their favorite apps/additions/add-ons/whatever for Android would not be allowed or even possible in the iOS App Store. This gets to the point of my article, though. Most apps for the iPhone could be ported to Android. They’d lack a bit of polish, in many cases. It’s highly doubtful something like Rage HD is even possible on any Android device today. Media apps like Netflix and MLB At Bat are problematic for Android because Android devices don’t have a standard DRM system. But most of my personal favorite iOS apps, including games, could, technically, exist today on Android in a more or less equivalent form. But they don’t.
iOS’s best apps could exist for Android but don’t. Android’s best apps couldn’t exist for iPhone.
In theory, then, Android could be beating iOS in both regards. Android could be the platform with exclusive apps like Reeder, Twitterrific, Things, Simplenote, Instagram, Calvetica, PCalc, and Pastebot — in addition to the exclusives it already has like Swype and home screen replacements that the iPhone can’t have. What I find interesting is that Android just doesn’t have apps like this. There is no Iconfactory or Tapbots for Android.
A lot of the Android-vs.-iOS horse race coverage focuses on unit sales and market share, but simply never even mentions this disparity in developer support, except to simply list that the iTunes App Store has X total apps and Android Market has Y total apps.
I’m not saying (here, with this argument, at least) that iOS is better than Android. I’m just saying that the iOS App Store is thriving in a way that the Android Market is not. And, that the Android Market would be thriving in this way if handset market share were all that mattered.
So: Why?
That could be. The iPhone had developer appeal from day one. In fact, it had developer appeal before it was even released. Android didn’t have that appeal out of the gate. But what Android now has are raw numbers — millions and millions of users. According to Andy Rubin, 300,000 phone activations per day. As the size of the overall Android user base grows, it will inevitably attract more developer attention, so the argument goes.
Third-party developer support for Android is likely to grow — it almost seems like a certainty given the growth in Android handset sales — but I don’t think it’s going to grow in an iOS-like way.
Note, too, that the U.S. market looks different than the worldwide market. Here’s a recent report from Comscore that claims Android is very close to catching the iPhone in total U.S. smartphone users. Note that those numbers are U.S.-only, and only for phones — thus excluding the iPad and iPod Touch. [URL="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/11/30/mobile-os-usage-splits-the-world-chart/"]Compare that to these worldwide numbers[/URL] for overall web usage by mobile OS, which shows iOS with more than double the share of Android.
But even considering only the U.S. smartphone market, keep in mind that the iPhone is exclusive to a single carrier — the one with the worst network quality and worst customer service. These market share numbers are true today, and we shouldn’t start counting our Verizon iPhone chickens before they’re hatched, but surely, a Verizon iPhone in early 2011 would change these numbers significantly.
Fred Wilson, principal of Union Square Ventures and author of the A VC weblog, wrote a piece last week recommending that mobile developers focus first on Android:
Again, I think it’s unwise to focus solely on U.S. market share, and even more unwise to focus on “smartphone” market share, ignoring non-phones like the iPod Touch and iPad (and, now, Android devices like the Galaxy Tab). But even with just U.S. smartphones, I think he’s underestimating the impact a Verizon iPhone would have. Even if Wilson is right that the iPhone would gain only 10 percent share — from around 25 percent to “the mid 30s” — would not a large chunk of that gain come specifically at Android’s expense? Verizon is the number one carrier for Android phones in the U.S. — and the U.S. is Android’s strongest market.
The bigger flaw in Wilson’s reasoning is that he seems to think that all smartphone users are equivalent. Based on those Comscore numbers, iOS and Android each account for roughly 25 percent of the U.S. smartphone market. But from a developer’s perspective, are those audiences equivalent? Wilson is arguing that they are. I don’t think that’s true at all. If Instagram were an Android exclusive rather than an iOS exclusive, would it have picked up 100,000 users in its first week and a million in its first month? No way, I say....
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PS! This is not a fanboy post, look at the argument in the article
A better headline for that piece would have been, “Where Are the iOS-Style Killer Apps for Android?” That gets to the heart of my argument.
In my piece, I wrote:
Many Android supporters took that as an attempt on my part to dismiss Android’s strengths as somehow not counting. But I wasn’t arguing about the merits of iOS vs. Android overall. I was (and am now, again) trying to make a specific point about third-party developer support for these two platforms.
Mark Pilgrim tweeted:
Most of the apps Android users claim they couldn’t live without (if they were forced to switch to iOS) come from Google. Most of the apps iOS users claim they couldn’t live without (if they were forced to switch to Android) are from the App Store. (Feel free to replace “couldn’t live without” with the un-hyperbolic “would miss the most”.)
One fundamental difference between the two is that Android allows third-party software to change the system itself in certain ways. You can add components that show up in standard menus across the system. There’s a standard “do something with this URL” menu, for example. Third parties can add items to that menu, very much like how you can add system-wide Services in Mac OS X. Third parties can also replace the Android home screen, and replace the touchscreen keyboard. There are lots of Swype fans out there.
So lots of Android fans argue, with merit, that most of their favorite apps/additions/add-ons/whatever for Android would not be allowed or even possible in the iOS App Store. This gets to the point of my article, though. Most apps for the iPhone could be ported to Android. They’d lack a bit of polish, in many cases. It’s highly doubtful something like Rage HD is even possible on any Android device today. Media apps like Netflix and MLB At Bat are problematic for Android because Android devices don’t have a standard DRM system. But most of my personal favorite iOS apps, including games, could, technically, exist today on Android in a more or less equivalent form. But they don’t.
iOS’s best apps could exist for Android but don’t. Android’s best apps couldn’t exist for iPhone.
In theory, then, Android could be beating iOS in both regards. Android could be the platform with exclusive apps like Reeder, Twitterrific, Things, Simplenote, Instagram, Calvetica, PCalc, and Pastebot — in addition to the exclusives it already has like Swype and home screen replacements that the iPhone can’t have. What I find interesting is that Android just doesn’t have apps like this. There is no Iconfactory or Tapbots for Android.
A lot of the Android-vs.-iOS horse race coverage focuses on unit sales and market share, but simply never even mentions this disparity in developer support, except to simply list that the iTunes App Store has X total apps and Android Market has Y total apps.
I’m not saying (here, with this argument, at least) that iOS is better than Android. I’m just saying that the iOS App Store is thriving in a way that the Android Market is not. And, that the Android Market would be thriving in this way if handset market share were all that mattered.
So: Why?
That could be. The iPhone had developer appeal from day one. In fact, it had developer appeal before it was even released. Android didn’t have that appeal out of the gate. But what Android now has are raw numbers — millions and millions of users. According to Andy Rubin, 300,000 phone activations per day. As the size of the overall Android user base grows, it will inevitably attract more developer attention, so the argument goes.
Third-party developer support for Android is likely to grow — it almost seems like a certainty given the growth in Android handset sales — but I don’t think it’s going to grow in an iOS-like way.
Note, too, that the U.S. market looks different than the worldwide market. Here’s a recent report from Comscore that claims Android is very close to catching the iPhone in total U.S. smartphone users. Note that those numbers are U.S.-only, and only for phones — thus excluding the iPad and iPod Touch. [URL="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/11/30/mobile-os-usage-splits-the-world-chart/"]Compare that to these worldwide numbers[/URL] for overall web usage by mobile OS, which shows iOS with more than double the share of Android.
But even considering only the U.S. smartphone market, keep in mind that the iPhone is exclusive to a single carrier — the one with the worst network quality and worst customer service. These market share numbers are true today, and we shouldn’t start counting our Verizon iPhone chickens before they’re hatched, but surely, a Verizon iPhone in early 2011 would change these numbers significantly.
Fred Wilson, principal of Union Square Ventures and author of the A VC weblog, wrote a piece last week recommending that mobile developers focus first on Android:
He bases this advice on market share trends, citing the same U.S. smartphone market share numbers from Comscore I linked to above:
Again, I think it’s unwise to focus solely on U.S. market share, and even more unwise to focus on “smartphone” market share, ignoring non-phones like the iPod Touch and iPad (and, now, Android devices like the Galaxy Tab). But even with just U.S. smartphones, I think he’s underestimating the impact a Verizon iPhone would have. Even if Wilson is right that the iPhone would gain only 10 percent share — from around 25 percent to “the mid 30s” — would not a large chunk of that gain come specifically at Android’s expense? Verizon is the number one carrier for Android phones in the U.S. — and the U.S. is Android’s strongest market.
The bigger flaw in Wilson’s reasoning is that he seems to think that all smartphone users are equivalent. Based on those Comscore numbers, iOS and Android each account for roughly 25 percent of the U.S. smartphone market. But from a developer’s perspective, are those audiences equivalent? Wilson is arguing that they are. I don’t think that’s true at all. If Instagram were an Android exclusive rather than an iOS exclusive, would it have picked up 100,000 users in its first week and a million in its first month? No way, I say....
-------------------------------------
PS! This is not a fanboy post, look at the argument in the article
