4 ms·

>at ~78% of the mobile market share That's the most misleading & pointless statistic I've ever come across and definitely the most dangerous one if you're a de

by Jerry2 11y ago

>at ~78% of the mobile market share That's the most misleading & pointless statistic I've ever come across and definitely the most dangerous one if you're a developer. Why? Well, VAST MAJORITY of that marketshare are phones that are so cheaply made that they cannot run even 4.4 let alone 5. Only a tiny portion of these phones are actually capable of running latest apps & games well. So all these people running non-Android (China for example doesn't really run certified Android but various forks of AOSP) are not really your customers. And don't even get me started on user base... if you read Google Play reviews, you'll notice that people give you 1 star ratings if you decide to charge for an app or decide to have IAPs in your "free" app. So good luck making a living off Android apps. About the only way you can do it, and the most common way for Android devs to make money these days, is to exfiltrate as much personal data as possible and sell it to data brokers. That's why all these "free" apps require so many permissions. Anyway, I've been an Android dev for 4+ years and recently moved into server-side development but I pity the guys who still try to make a living off Android.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
I'm okay with apps becoming non-profitable commodities, at least for the general user. We have enough fremium games and other junk as-is. Apps should be added-value for another product (control my theromstat, get richer content from a website, etc). The vision of mobile as eating the world never made sense. It has its place and unsurprisingly, the gold rush is ending. You can only make so many Angry Bird clones and flashlight apps. Apps will eventually be like the web. They won't be profit makers on their own. Its also good to see a lot of the goldrush crowd go away. The app store is just too gamified to the point that finding good stuff in near impossible unless you know the exact name of the app you want.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  "I'm okay with apps becoming non-profitable commodities" As a developer, I'm not.
- Jerry2 11y ago
  >I'm okay with apps becoming non-profitable commodities, You're delusional if you think you will have free AND excellent apps at the same time. It's usually "pick one" situation. To have great apps you need incentive for developers to make them (which is 99% of the time MONEY). Take the money out of the equation and you have mostly junk.
fidotron 11y ago
This is entirely true, and it's omitting the worst aspects of the situation relating to revenue and platform momentum. As someone that has overseen tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of installs driven off the Play Store in my time it pains me to admit that economically speaking Android does not make sense at all today. My impression is many of the HN crowd are in denial about this. Two or three years ago things did look very different. Reflexively I often like to blame poor stewardship for the situation, but in more sober moments I've come to think that the way Android is distributed and the OHA operated is structurally unsound. The surprising aspect of it is just how successful Apple have been at cultivating an audience composed of the vast proportion of valuable customers, and had they not had such success then the open source Android may have worked out better. This pisses me off massively because Android makes all sorts of more technically interesting end user apps possible, but with a business hat on if it can't also be made to work on iOS it's not worth doing.
- Oletros 11y ago
  > As someone that has overseen tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of installs driven off the Play Store in my time it pains me to admit that economically speaking Android does not make sense at all today. > My impression is many of the HN crowd are in denial about this Oh, the irony here is great

by Jerry2 11y ago

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

I'm okay with apps becoming non-profitable commodities, at least for the general user. We have enough fremium games and other junk as-is. Apps should be added-value for another product (control my theromstat, get richer content from a website, etc). The vision of mobile as eating the world never made sense. It has its place and unsurprisingly, the gold rush is ending. You can only make so many Angry Bird clones and flashlight apps. Apps will eventually be like the web. They won't be profit makers on their own. Its also good to see a lot of the goldrush crowd go away. The app store is just too gamified to the point that finding good stuff in near impossible unless you know the exact name of the app you want.

s73v3r 11y ago
"I'm okay with apps becoming non-profitable commodities" As a developer, I'm not.
Jerry2 11y ago
>I'm okay with apps becoming non-profitable commodities, You're delusional if you think you will have free AND excellent apps at the same time. It's usually "pick one" situation. To have great apps you need incentive for developers to make them (which is 99% of the time MONEY). Take the money out of the equation and you have mostly junk.

fidotron 11y ago

This is entirely true, and it's omitting the worst aspects of the situation relating to revenue and platform momentum. As someone that has overseen tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of installs driven off the Play Store in my time it pains me to admit that economically speaking Android does not make sense at all today. My impression is many of the HN crowd are in denial about this. Two or three years ago things did look very different. Reflexively I often like to blame poor stewardship for the situation, but in more sober moments I've come to think that the way Android is distributed and the OHA operated is structurally unsound. The surprising aspect of it is just how successful Apple have been at cultivating an audience composed of the vast proportion of valuable customers, and had they not had such success then the open source Android may have worked out better. This pisses me off massively because Android makes all sorts of more technically interesting end user apps possible, but with a business hat on if it can't also be made to work on iOS it's not worth doing.

Oletros 11y ago
> As someone that has overseen tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of installs driven off the Play Store in my time it pains me to admit that economically speaking Android does not make sense at all today. > My impression is many of the HN crowd are in denial about this Oh, the irony here is great