Android App Quality Pathetically Low Says Developer 336
Hugh Pickens writes "Christopher Mims writes at MIT Technology Review that Mika Mobile, developer of Battleheart, a big hit on both the iOS and Android platforms, says that 'a polished, high quality product is more likely to be embraced on Android than on iOS because the quality bar on the android market is so pathetically low.' Evidence to that effect comes from the fact that 'on iOS, user reviews for Battleheart average 4.5 stars (4000 total ratings), which is quite good. On Android it's a stunning 4.8, with 1000 ratings,' writes the developer. 'So not only is it reviewed more highly, it's also reviewed more often, with a huge percentage of android users taking the time to rate the app. I think the lack of competition makes quality apps really stand out, and generates a lot of enthusiasm from app-starved android users." Mika Mobile adds that the most frustrating part about developing for Android is dealing with the deluge of support e-mail, most of which is related to download and installation problems which have nothing to do with the app itself, and everything to do with the Android OS and market having innate technical problems. 'Do some googling for "can't download apps from android market" or similar wording, and you'll see that this is a widespread chronic issue for all devices and all OS versions,' writes the developer. 'Based on the amount of e-mails I get every day, download problems effect 1-2% of all buyers, or in more practical terms, somewhere between two and three s**t-loads.'"
99% of everything is crap, says everyone (Score:5, Funny)
In other news:
Stay tuned for tomorrow's report: "Everything Was Better When I Was Younger, Reports Random Asshole on Street"
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Re:99% of everything is crap, says everyone (Score:5, Funny)
"Scientists Discover Onion Writer Who's Not Obnoxious, Cynical Prick"
"We were are surprised as everyone else," says lead scientist.
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FWIW: If carpenters built buildings like programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker to come around would destroy civilization.
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Yeah, we went ahead and replaced your joists with spaghetti and your foundation with Jello...but we think we can make it work, with a few patches and bugfixes.
Re:99% of everything is crap, says everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
That is an understandable way to feel, but if you really think about the level of complexity, nothing a carpenter does is nearly as complex as most applications. If you thought of ever line of code as a single piece of clockwork connected with other pieces of clockwork, an average application would be a clockwork construction about the size of a tractor trailer. The level of complexity is actually kind of staggering when you think about it. I'm often amazed that software works as well as it does.
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Hah ain't it the truth.
On a more serious note, this article should have been put in the Firehose. We've all just been trolled by this garbage. Most smartphone apps, regardless of platform, are crap. I have an iPhone. I'd venture to say that most apps that aren't games are:
1) Buggy and crash
2) Have majorly stripped down features or no features at all to make it worthless. For example: the Myspace app or the Google Voice app. They're simple web services, and therefore should easily be transported to a smartph
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Stay tuned for tomorrow's report: "Everything Was Better When I Was Younger, Reports Random Asshole on Street"
"Today's cantankerous curmudgeons aren't a patch on the cantankerous curmudgeons you got when I was a lad. You call that griping? That's not even mumbling discontentedly! If you want griping, you should have talked to old "Jawbone" Perkins. Now there was a man who could complain about falling standards! Why, I remember a time when he heard about this new car ...."
Title (Score:5, Informative)
Android App Quality Pathetically Low SaysDeveloper
Title Quality Pathetically Low, Says Commenter.
Re:Title (Score:4, Insightful)
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Android App Quality Pathetically Low SaysDeveloper
Title Quality Pathetically Low, SaysCommenter.
FTFY
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
when my iPhone friends play with my phone they are pretty much always impressed.
When your iPhone friends play with a block of wood, they're pretty much always impressed too. Don't give that too much weight.
Re:Uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
when my iPhone friends play with my phone they are pretty much always impressed.
When your iPhone friends play with a block of wood, they're pretty much always impressed too. Don't give that too much weight.
Only if it has an Apple logo on it. Otherwise the fanbois will say that Apple could make superior wood blocks.
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when my iPhone friends play with my phone they are pretty much always impressed.
When your iPhone friends play with a block of wood, they're pretty much always impressed too. Don't give that too much weight.
Only if it has an Apple logo on it. Otherwise the fanbois will say that Apple could make superior wood blocks.
The people I know with iPhones tend to be more technologically challenged than those in my circle with Android phones, IMHO. While it may not be a statistically significant sample, the fact that someone went to the trouble of making this animation [youtube.com] leads me to believe I might not be the only one who thinks so.
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I've never met a droid user who bought it because they wanted it
Hi, a Samsung Galaxy S2 (and previously Nexus One) owner here, pleased to meet you. I paid more for both of these phones - for starters, because I couldn't buy them on contract, and also because I had SGS2 shipped from Europe since it's not out in US. I knowingly did so because I wanted specific features only available in an Android phone.
Oh yes, in between Nexus and SGS2, I had an iPhone for a few months. It's good overall, and excellent in some aspects (most notably, battery life), but it doesn't match up
It's LOG!! (Score:5, Funny)
When your iPhone friends play with a block of wood, they're pretty much always impressed too. Don't give that too much weight.
What rolls down stairs
alone or in pairs,
and over your neighbor's dog?
What's great for a snack,
And fits on your back?
It's log, log, log
It's log, it's log,
It's big, it's heavy, it's wood.
It's log, it's log, it's better than bad, it's good."
Everyone wants a log
You're gonna love it, log
Come on and get your log
Everyone needs a log
log log log
*whistle*
LOG FROM BLAMMO
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No. It's "blame apple fanboys for FUD and rhetoric".
I enjoy the fact that I dumped Apple every time I need to manage media or clean out my SMS messages.
I am less interested in the store, or how much money Google is making, or how much money app developers are making.
I am more interested in the actual phone.
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I am more interested in the actual phone.
Really? Then why did you buy a device where the phone is a secondary function? Seems like it would have made sense to by a device where the phone was the primary function.
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my iPhone friends
What is that a euphemism for?
Re:Uhhh... (Score:5, Interesting)
How is 4.8 vs 4.5 all that much of a difference? If android had just as many reviews, it could easily drop that .3 stars and be just as equally rated as the iphone version.
When apps on Android ARE truly lower quality than their iphone counterparts, it's usually because the developers saw android as a lower priority and only put a half-effort into developing the app. When i see this it seriously annoys the heck out of me. Tap Tap Revenge is a prime example of a pretty solid app on iOS that is a total piece of crap on Android, directly through the fault of the developer.
Also, the news item can't make up its mind what it's about. Are the apps low quality or is the android platform?
Re:Uhhh... (Score:4, Funny)
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Stock Android that came with your phone? Or did you follow the most common path to fixing Android issues, which is "root your phone/install 3rd party mod?" ;-)
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Do people pay money for Android apps? (Score:3)
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Talk to any company that develops for both Android and iOS, ask them which platform makes them more money. See if you can compare income to phone market penetration.
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Speaking as someone who developed for both and posting anon so as not 'spam'. I have some utilities for both iOS and Android available. The best selling one (a network utility, subnet calc, etc. all in one) had consistently pulled in ~$3k/month from the AppStore, that's after Apple's cut. Android, on the other hand, nets ~$150/month yet has approximately 3.5 times the installs. That's due to rampant piracy. The software still does auto-checks for versions which is how I know.
Guess where I'm concentrati
Re:Do people pay money for Android apps? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes it absolutely is true. iPhone users don't have a problem coughing up some cash to support their developers. Android users typically complain like crazy - even when the application is free. One minor issue - 1 star and a flamed comment. Furthermore, because piracy is so high, adware is forced to be the primary source of revenue for developers. Which in turn, pirates and rooted users actively work to deny any and all possible source of income for developers.
As a result of piracy and selfish, dumb users, the quality of applications on the platform typically suffers. Its not exactly rocket science.
Here's an example application I knew of from some time back. ~2500 downloads from market. ~1500 purchases. ~250,000 pirate installs.The developer abandoned their application. But thankfully pirates assure us they are not the cause of the problems. After all, its dumb for the developer to believe he's entitled to a paycheck just like the hypocritical pirate live on. According to pirates, developers are only fit to live in the streets while they, themselves, demand additional features.
Re:Do people pay money for Android apps? (Score:4, Insightful)
When all of your users are willing to pay the Apple tax, you know they're casual with how they spend money.
When you have a diverse device base, you likewise have a diverse user base. Of course percentage-wise, the iOS users will be more willing to spend money compared to Android as an ecosystem.
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Revenue wise, the Apple App Store makes hands-over-fist more money than the Google Marketplace rakes in, and it seems per-device app payments is higher on iOS than Android. (Apple has publicly said they paid out $2.5B to developers).
This ignores indirect revenue sources though. Some Android
Paying for offline use (Score:2)
I don't understand why I should pay for an app on my Android phone when I can often do the same thing for free on my browser on my computer or even inside my phone.
Because not everybody has an Android phone. Some people have a Wi-Fi-only tablet and are paying for use of the application away from open-to-the-public Wi-Fi coverage.
phone status, full internet connection
An application that pauses multimedia playback when a call comes in needs to get notified of incoming calls through "phone status". An application that downloads advertisements or verifies the user's license to use the application requires "full Internet access", as does a game that publishes the player's high score or other achievements.
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"dude"?
Rovio is not a one-man show, the team is pretty big.
Also, citation needed.
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So, they "made" $1M in ad revenue from android - per month, in the future, maybe. Assuming that it doesn't fall out of favor, or that people don't get sick of the ads.
From your article, there were 12M downloads on iOS. Which means $11.88M in app revenue from iOS. Already, as of December 2010 - before the iPad2. Which funded the ad revenue model on Android.
Video game artists still need to eat (Score:3)
Since I've been a denizen of the Linux/BSD world for over 15 years, I find it goes against the grain to pay for software - not because I am a cheapskate, but because I prefer the Free model.
One place where the free software model has tended to fall down over the past couple decades is video games that aren't of the single-screen-puzzle type. Even if a video game's program is released as free software, the 3D artists, level designers, etc. still need to eat, and single-player video games don't offer as much of an opportunity to sell support as business applications. What's the best way to involve artists in the production of free video games?
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You mean, the entire Debian is too little for you?
Some GUI programs are unusable due to assumption that the vertical resolution is much bigger than 480, and some fail badly due to quirks of Hildon widgets, but in general, you can do everything you would be able to do on a Pentium III 256MB ram 32GB disk laptop. No graphic accelerator since it has OpenGLES while most 3D games/etc expect OpenGL, but that's mostly due to bad proprietary display drivers. In the future, even that won't be a problem even if no
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but in general, you can do everything you would be able to do on a Pentium III 256MB ram 32GB disk laptop.
Wow, soooooooo compelling. And to think for some reason it wasn't a success.
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They make way more on the free ad version than they do on the paid one
You might want to go look at those revenue links. They don't actually say that. They say them might, in the future, maybe.
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Since Rovio hasn't actually said what the revenues were, I doubt any of the numbers are verifiable or true.
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It sounds like the lesson here is that iPhone users are still willing to pay for what are essentially specialized Yellow Pages. I don't mean to knock your app (it actually sounds like something that I would like and maybe I'll check it out later today), but it's pretty amazing that users (rather than the businesses getting listed) would be willing to pay for something like that. (OTOH if the businesses pay, then the listings lose integrity so no users want to use it, so .. hey, it's a dilemma.)
Apple users
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Considering that the default Google search page has a link to local bars (with map and all), the idea of selling such an app for money is patently absurd.
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Wow, that's a perfect example of why people don't develop for Android - more ways not to get paid.
4000 1000? (Score:3, Insightful)
It does not seem to be rated that much more highly, and it is certainly not reviewed more often.
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yeah, I caught that too. Maybe there's a time scale that was missed here, i.e. being available for longer on iOS or something.
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funny - and it wasn't a copy&paste error of TFS but is a direct quote from the developer's blog [blogspot.com].
and to blame the coder more: it seems he believe what he wrote; at the moment his game is rated in the Android market 1400 times...
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Yes, but has it been out for a year on the iPhone and 2 months on Android? If thats the cause, the android version IS selling faster at this point.
Statistics you don't understand aren't useful. Please try to understand the statistics you're looking at before you talk about how great/evil/right/wrong they are.
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yes, I read the later comments about "reviews per sold copy" may be a solution for the strange sentence. Maybe my wording was too harsh but I stick to my opinion: The meaning of the statement is not understandable without a high level of interpretation
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It does not seem to be rated that much more highly, and it is certainly not reviewed more often.
From reading the developer's blog post, it's clear he's sold a lot more on iOS than Android. It's not clear from the linked article, but he's saying that Android users are more likely to give a rating for a purchased application. The 1000 Android ratings represent a larger proportion of sales he's had on Android, than the 4000 iOS reviews measured against the total sales he's made on that platform.
Oh the scales! (Score:4)
So from "quite good" to "stunning" is a 0.3 rating on a 1 to 5 scale? That's quite a non-linear scale.
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So from "quite good" to "stunning" is a 0.3 rating on a 1 to 5 scale? That's quite a non-linear scale.
Maybe its like the video game review website scale, where they call it 1 to 10 but oddly enough everything scores 8 to 10.
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So from "quite good" to "stunning" is a 0.3 rating on a 1 to 5 scale? That's quite a non-linear scale.
Maybe its like the video game review website scale, where they call it 1 to 10 but oddly enough everything scores 8 to 10.
So from "quite good" to "stunning" is a 0.3 rating on a 1 to 5 scale? That's quite a non-linear scale.
Maybe its like the video game review website scale, where they call it 1 to 10 but oddly enough everything scores 8 to 10.
Because anything under an 8 rating means you wont get that publishers next title for review.
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Also 20,000+ high quality fart and broken screen apps tend to be weighted fairly low in most people's assessment.
I find that there are loads of good, high quality Android apps. There are plenty of shitty wallpaper "apps" and just plain crap ones, but that is true of iOS too. Just having a fancy page turn effect does not make an app higher quality (but does piss away battery life quite efficiently).
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A 1 to 5 scale is really a 4-5 scale.
People are generally too pussy or to mad to rate properly.
In this day and age, where everyone wants to be nice to everyone, and most people have self-esteem issues so they want everyone else in the world to like them, no one gives accurate reviews. You'll get 4 starts for a shitty app just cause no one wants to make the developer feel bad.
This is a well known and established fact.
A 1-10 scale is more like a 6/7-10 scale if they are good about it, really its probably a 8
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Free Advertising? (Score:2)
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Before this i had never heard of 'Battleheart'. /. advertising at it's best.
Eh, I'd argue that anyone into RPGs on ipods/phones/tablets probably already knew about Battlehart and already decided to either download it or skip it. Its not new. Its like complaining "John Carmack, of Id software" is a slashvertisement, maybe to people who still have not played Doom...
I had no idea who the author is, I like playing battleheart, so knowing the guy actually knows something about game design and programming makes his opinion somewhat more useful than the author of yet another fart app or
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Agree ! (Score:2)
So...what do you need to do exactly? (Score:2)
Apple users don't have install problems? (Score:3)
How do we know that Apple users aren't having similar issues but are asking in apple forums how to install stuff or at the genius bar, and those comments aren't deleted from the apple forums ?
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So, iOS install is flawless, except when it isn't.
Isn't 1000 Less Than 4800? (Score:3)
1000 4000 (Score:2)
Evidence to that effect comes from the fact that "on iOS, user reviews for Battleheart average 4.5 stars (4000 total ratings), which is quite good. On Android it's a stunning 4.8, with 1000 ratings," writes the developer. "So not only is it reviewed more highly, it's also reviewed more often,
Or is he saying that there are more than 4x as many iOS users as Android users?
Thought I read very recently that Android was more prevalent.
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Read a bit better and you'll notice that he says:
4.5 > 4.8
4000 > 1000
or
4.5 < 4.8
4000 < 1000
Depending on what "it" is. Does not compute.
Fear of android (Score:3)
Seriously, I'm not sure what the point of this article is. He dismisses higher ratings and then compains of technical issues. Err, okay.
From what I can tell, there's a real fear of the breaking of the Apple monopoly right now. Froyo and Gingerbread and Honeycomb are really on par with Apple's usually excellent mobile quality. Android phones are now moving into dual cores and with Gingerbread can do hardware acceleration. I think we're looking at a lot of people who have invested themselves into iOS and are now complaining that their customers are moving to Android. Now these developers have to learn a new mobile ecosystem and deal with its issues.
Christ, imagine if these people were as whiny about Windows as they are about Android. "OMG, one of my customers is using a slow Pentium 4!" Grow up, whiny devs. Either you move with the market or you fall behind. Someone else will make the next fart simulator or tip calculator. You're not some genius the world needs, you're 100% replaceable. If you can't code for my phone that fine because your competitors can.
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There would have to be an "Apple monopoly" for it to be broken, or for there to be any fear that it "might" be broken at some point in the near future.
Since there isn't, is it safe to dismiss the rest of your post as insane rambling?
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Android counterpart to iPod touch (Score:2)
Froyo and Gingerbread and Honeycomb are really on par with Apple's usually excellent mobile quality.
Unlike iOS, which has the iPod touch, Android doesn't appear to have a flagship pocket-size Wi-Fi tablet. Sure, there's the Archos 43 Internet Tablet, but its touch screen is resistive and thus incompatible with applications requiring multitouch such as Cordy. Archos 43 also doesn't come with Android Market, instead relying on AppsLib and Amazon Appstore and missing out on Market-exclusive applications such as my bank's check deposit app.
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OMG, one of my customers is using a slow Pentium 4!
That slow pentium 4 is still capable of actually being useful as 'slow' in PCs now days is still incredibly fast.
On a phone however the difference between fast and slow is trivial, so a slow phone is far more noticeable.
Of course, I could rant and rave about how the fact that someone notices their phone is slow already shows the whole thing is built wrong, but that'd take too long.
Froyo and Gingerbread and Honeycomb
Really? 3 different versions are as good as iOS ... then why are there 3 versions? The funny part is that you say froyo and gi
That was my impression... (Score:4, Interesting)
I purchased a Motorola Xoom (my first Android device) about a month after it came out... Wow was I ever disappointed. It would crash several times an hour just browsing the web (especially on Motorola's own Xoom website), but I chalked that up to "being an early adopter". Then I started downloading apps from the Android market and things got even worse, if the app even loaded without crashing, I felt like I was teleported back to the late 90's from a design / look & feel standpoint. Other than the rare exceptions ( Angry Birds ) every app I downloaded didn't even compare to a similar app on Apple's App Store, it felt like companies/developers were publishing an app for Android just to say they did it, without the intention of it actually being used. Many apps that did have an iOS counterpart (*cough* thinkorswim *cough*) hadn't been updated in almost a year and were pathetic at best.
Needless to say after two weeks of torture I took it back and purchased an iPad2, I've been quite happy with it.
Hopefully in a few years it will be a different story, I would much prefer if Apple had some decent competition.
Of course it is. And it's not just Android. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this an ad? (Score:2)
Because it sounds like one, look my app is rated very well on both markets, which means you should really buy i, but first I need to discover a round about means to get free advertisement. So lets start a flame war
Proof that users are just stupid? (Score:3)
Go on the Android Market and check out any widget. Invariably you will see comments along the lines "I installed the widget, but now I can't open it. It sucks."
People can't even be bothered to understand that widgets and apps are different. You open apps but you add widgets to your screen. Is it intuitive? Probably not. But that doesn't change the fact that some people are unwilling or unable to understand anything about the devices they use.
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My experience (Score:3)
I've been using an Android phone (LG Thrive on AT&T prepay) for three months now, after having used an iOS device (iTouch) for a couple years along with a "dumb" phone. I mainly did this to consolidate devices - I got tired of carrying a phone and an iPod around. My conclusion thus far is: Android is a mixed bag.
Several of the apps Google itself offers are awesome (I love the beta Voice Navigation app! But, notably, the stock music player sucks). The mainstream commercial apps (read: "Angry Birds") are, as you'd expect, on par with their iOS counterparts. However the bulk of the apps do feel somewhat klunky and unpolished compared to similar apps available for Apple devices. Often they don't look as good, and expected features are not there - Google searches on the product will return a lot of "you've said that feature was coming for over two years now!" sorts of posts.
There are niggling issues in terms of integration with one's desktop environment, for those apps where that's relevant; but I don't think that's the developers' fault - I suspect Google doesn't do anything to make that easy because they want you to live in their ecosystem 100% of the time.
That said -
Big News! (Score:2)
Consider the writer of TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
Rethinking Apps for the iPad By Christopher Mims
App Developers Sticking to iPhone By Christopher Mims
can the Creators of the iPhone Make Home Energy Management Sexy? Christopher Mims
No bias towards Apple there. Nope, none at all.
Apple users are guilty (Score:2)
Not flaming: I am an iPhone4 and iPad2 owner, and I love them. But, I feel a little guilty about it. I an in a walled garden, my freedom is curtailed, etc. etc., and as a geek, I feel guilty about that. So, I don't spend any more money than I need to within this walled garden, and I don't speak up about it very often.
If I had an Android device, I would be much more vocal and enthusiastic about it, I would buy more apps, and probably be inclined to rate them more often and more highly, because I would be get
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Yep. Everything I've seen recently says that there are more Android devices out there than iOS (though iPhones are the most successful handset type), so I don't see how 1000 Android users is a higher percentage users than 4000 iOS users..
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
The article says he gets 80% of the revenue on Android that he gets on iTunes. On the assumption that the app is the same price on both platforms, and on the assumption that Google takes the same cut (30%) that Apple takes, he sells more iPhone copies than Android copies but nowhere near by a factor of four.
If Google takes a lesser cut he is probably selling more copies on Google.
However, I have just checked the game on iTunes and I see it currently has only 597 ratings for all versions of the game (453 for the current version). So I would think the blog post from which the 4,000 figure comes from has a typo in it.
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The only thing I can assume is that he left out the number of downloads on each device. So it may be proportionally more. Maybe not. Who knows.
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1. Ratings are 1-5, So 0.3 is 7.5% of the total scale. Not huge, but half the gap between a Pass and a Credit from my university days.
2. Way more copies have been sold on iOS than on Android, so on Android the game is reviewed more often when bought. Which is obvious in the original article, not so obvious when random snippets are pulled out of context in a summary.
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morning? it's 5 pm before a public holiday - this is only a little bit of friday afternoon trolling
Let's try across the road (Score:2)
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And who to blame for the existence and proliferation of cheap Chinese tablets? Right. Google.
By commoditizing the mobile OS with a "free" offering, they've ensured a race to bare minimum quality among the many handset / tablet manufacturers. You can't save much money by cutting your OS dev costs once you use Android, so you save money and shave margins by cutting testing & integration resources, while hoping that the raw horsepower you're cramming into the device will make up for its lack of detail f
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When I had an Android device, I was wanting to blame the cheap Chinese developers. Seriously. Some of the "apps" are just stupid soundboard apps and crap that shows you a picture when you finish a call. Completely worthless shit, but Chinese developers were just flooding the Android Market with stuff like that.
The iTunes app store has a similar problem. Look at all the Chinese shit in the Medical category.
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Because 4000 is a typo.
If anyone bothered to look at the App on the App store to verify it, they'd see that his current version has a little over 450 reviews, not 4000 ... making a typo and 400 sound much more correct.