Platform wars are best left for OS vendor marketing staff. Consumers
don't care because they buy whatever fits their personal needs and
desires. Developers don't care because most of the ones making any
serious money are deploying to both.
To put it into perspective, half of all iOS revenues go to only the top
100 developers, and the majority of those apps are available on both
platforms. The top 1,000 developers consumer most of the app store
revenue, with the other million+ dividing the rest for an income that
ranges from below minimum wage to zero. Depending on which reports you
read, somewhere between 15% and 30% of apps in the iOS app store have
never been downloaded at all. In brief, hardly worth bickering about.
Yes, there's money to be made in mobile, but it's not like having an
identical app store entry out of more than a million is all it takes.
Like all software products ever, it takes a good business plan well
executed in product design and the robustness of its architecture, and
clarity in communicating its benefits in an equally-well-executed
marketing plan.
Sure, some devs make single-platform-only apps. But it's not a
majority, and getting smaller every year.
From the most recent Vision Mobile survey on developer economics:
26% - Android AND iOS
28% - Android only
12% - iOS only
It may seem crazy to see more than twice as many developers deploying to
Android exclusively as to iOS. After all, we all know that iOS
customers are a smaller but more desirable demographic in terms of
spending patterns; indeed they freely give Apple the highest profit
margins in the industry, and they spend as freely on apps as well.
But think about it: with the current installed bases being roughly
80/20, iOS customers need to spend not merely more than an Android
customer, but more than four times as much more before they become more
profitable.
And in the meantime, the scope of monetization options is much larger on
mobile than those of us used to a desktop economy might be inclined to
consider.
Several years ago Rovio noted that they were making the same money
giving Angry Birds away for free on Android as they were collecting
per-download fees on iOS. Advertising is not a small thing, and the
disparity in audience size has only grown since then.
And then there's freemium options with in-app purchases, separate
non-free versions without advertising that the ad-supported versions
promote, and more.
And best of all, all of that is supported on both platforms with
LiveCode, so we don't need to leave half the money on the table by
picking sides. Leave that to OS marketers, and just do what most
profitable devs do: enjoy your cross-platform toolkit and make everyone
very happy by being able to recommend your app to all their friends,
regardless which OS they use.
And when we step back to look at the bigger picture, for those of us
using LiveCode prospects get even better: not only can we build for
both mobile platforms, but also Mac, Windows, and even Linux, for a
scope of coverage no mobile-only developer can hope to reach.
We keep hearing about the so-called "post-PC era", but even today, many
years after that phrase has been bandied about, we still see roughly
half of all Internet usage coming from laptops and workstations.
Apparently the hundreds of authors who keep writing articles about how
no one uses their PCs any more didn't notice they were writing those
words on their PCs. :)
A mobile app can be useful. A mobile app that integrates with a desktop
app multiplies its usefulness.
I could go on about The Third Platform as a more profitable strategy
than mobile-only, but like too many of my posts this one has already
gotten too long.
So let me close with this tip: read the Vision Mobile surveys, and if
you can spare 5 minutes each quarter sign up to participate in them as
well. If nothing else it's one more opportunity to write "LiveCode"
into the "Other" box, but more importantly these surveys are some of the
largest and use some of the better methodologies we see in our field.
Here's the most recent Developer Economics report from Vision Mobile:
<http://www.visionmobile.com/product/developer-economics-q1-2015-state-developer-nation/#>
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems
Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
____________________________________________________________________
ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com
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