With Respect To Gaming, Android Still Lags Behind iOS (bgr.com) 166
An anonymous reader writes: No matter what you think about the Android/iOS divide from either a hardware or software perspective, there's simply no getting around the fact that many developers still take an iOS-first approach with respect to app development. With games, where development costs are already sky-high, the dynamic is even more pronounced. For instance, one of the most addictive, successful, and highly rated apps currently available on the App Store is a great snowboarding game called Alto's Adventure. It was originally released this past February for the iPhone and iPad (and now the Apple TV). Still today, nine months after its initial release, an Android version of the app remains non-existent. Now if you're an Android user who happens to enjoy mobile gaming, it's easy to see how this dynamic playing out over and over again can quickly become an endless source of frustration.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is iOS simply more profitable?
Is Android harder to program or support?
Is code easily portable?
Do iOS devices have more hardware resources?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think your first two points are the reason. People using iOS are far more likely to actually PAY for a game (or any other app for that matter). The fact that the iOS platform is far more homogeneous (At any point in time you have to cover 2 versions of the OS, three tablets and three phones to address 90+% of iOS users) make also development costs lower. Lower costs, higher profits, yes, the iOS platform is most likely an order of magnitude more profitable than Android.
Re: Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah there may be a million more Android users than iOS users but a good chunk of those are still on gingerbread or Froyo even and infested with exploits. It's hard to do tech support for a $3 app when the platform is probably at fault. Google is actually hurting its revenue picture on the app side by encouraging the abandonment of older devices through its policies. Android is popular enough now that Google really could tell the carriers the way it's going to be like Apple has been doing. It's a shame they
Re: Why? (Score:5, Informative)
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> iOS only captured 47.5 of 341.5 million in Q2 2015
That's an interesting graph for a number of reasons, but what caught my eye in particular is that the iOS and Android lines are an exact mirror image of each other. iOS clearly sells as a gift item, and its xmas-season upticks appear to cause an Android downturn.
And that actually doesn't make sense. If Android is the sort of go-to system for someone "just buying a phone", as opposed to "buying a present", I wouldn't think iOS sales would have any effect
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iOS spikes higher in 4Q because Apple typically releases the new iPhone in late 3Q/early 4Q, so there's a lot of seasonality to the sales. Android devices, on the other hand, are more evenly spread through the year.
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Those numbers you pointed to show the entire problem. The version with the highest number of devices is currently 4.4 (Kitkat) with 37.8%. It was relesed 2 years ago. Then there's 4 other versions with between 10% and 15% of the users each. Only 26% of users are on Version 5 or above. And it was released over a year ago. There might not be a lot of users on Gingerbread, but I'm sure there's a lot of devices on the shelf or on the trash heap that users have simply abandoned because they' won't run newer s
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The problem has less to do with device OS and hardware and more to do with the respective app store policies and sales model. Also, check your facts: there are exactly 0 devices that shipped with Gingerbread capable of running KitKat.
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You know, if you reframed your discussion in the context of Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8 a few years ago, you'd be in the same boat. Yet oddly there were tons of Windows games being released every year and Mac OS X gaming lagged behind (if games were released for it at all). Clearly in both cases, you could just target the oldest version (Jelly Bean/XP) and cover 90+% of users. So that's obviously not the issue. What would likely be the issue is instead that Android games are generally expected to be che
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As someone who has worked as a developer for a few small games on both platforms (this was back in the Android 2.0 - 3.0 days), I can say that hands-down iOS was MUCH quicker to develop a "finished" product that works well on all devices. The OS version matters only a tiny bit. What matters a lot more is manufacturer, screen size, resolution, aspect ratio, etc. Some specific Android devices had issues initializing OpenGL ES (causing it to work great on 9 phone models but crash on the 10th), different models
Re: Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
a good chunk of those are still on gingerbread or Froyo even
Which is of course horse shit. A mere 4% of users are on pre-4.0 versions of the OS [android.com], and their devices are likely not powerful enough to run any game that actually cares about API features from later versions.
Android had over 80% of the market in 2014, and rising. Even if any given Android user spends only 1/5th as much on apps, it's still as lucrative as iOS.
Finding a few games that are not out on Android means nothing. There are popular Android games not out on iOS. There are many games that can never come out on iOS due to content restrictions. The reasons why games don't always come out on every platform are complex, and looking at the AAA titles that are available on Android it's obvious that there is no problem developing or making money on the platform.
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There are popular Android games not out on iOS. There are many games that can never come out on iOS due to content restrictions.
Some claims that require citations. Care to share? Please leave out games that are functional equivalents to iOS editions.
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a few months ago i watched a part of an interview with a CTO of a navigation software company (they have apps for ios/android/blackberry/wp8). i think it was Sygic but i'm not sure now. he said 92% of all android installations of their software were pirated vs a completely negligible percentile on iOS. they get telemetry data from the app so they know exact numbers. he also said that historically, the worst piracy was on symbian.
if i was getting such levels of piracy on my app, i'd just give up on that plat
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i don't think you can make any money at those piracy levels. they way he described it was they ended up with loads of unfavourable reviews from people who didn't purchase the software and didn't use the latest version. people who were using buggy, malware ridden old versions were the loudest to complain.
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Java call from native which is really ugly to do...
Not really, you call your C API from a jni layer, big deal. What's so messy about that? The bigger problem in my mind are 1) Everything has a version you need to be aware of, from the api to java itself to the vm to external libraries to widgets, which is typical in development but its really kind of hairy with android. Still, development is possible. I've written a few android apps, its certainly doable. But calling an api from and ndk library through JNI is hardly "ugly", its not even a big deal. Google h
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I wouldn't need to create a union, cause i would simply program in C++. Even in Android's situation, Google could easily make some sort of C++ library for Android where they do all the JNI calls themselves. That way the user would never have to use JNI themselves. Even from there, odds are the Java code for the Android library
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I think you took his second point the wrong way, feature wise you can support Kitkat for android and that'll cover ~70% of users or something like that.
Except that there is an enormous range of hardware. For every iPhone hardware revision there are thousands of Android device hardware revisions, thinking that you can just code for an OS when you have a huge amount of hardware variation is very naive. The difficulty is in making sure the game runs decently on a vast range of hardware. It's easy to test on all supported hardware configurations for the latest iOS release but how do you do that for Android KitKat for example?
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I think that...
Yes, it is more profitable. Higher % or users who pay for apps, more difficulty to install "non-store" apps.
No, it is not that harder to program or support. Android device and version fragmentation is higher, but imho this is not that painful at all.
Almost as portable (due to fragmentation basically).
No, they do not necessarily have more HW resources, but there is a small number of devices, therefore device-specific optimization is possible in iOS (not in Android, with thousands of devices wi
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
As an Android developer of the last 6 years, my opinion:
Is iOS simply more profitable?
In a word - yes. Android users tend not to buy apps directly, iOS there seems to be an acceptance that most good apps will be paid, and Android most apps are free. If you can get money out of the user in a different way (eg subscriptions made elsewhere) it seems more even, but as for mobile purchases, the culture around Apple is more willing.
Is Android harder to program or support? Is code easily portable?
There are different challenges certainly but all the teams I've worked in have moved at about the same speed. The myth that Android is hard to program doesn't bear-out in reality. I think libraries like Unity mean there are even less platform differences in games than with plan apps.
Do iOS devices have more hardware resources?
No, top-end Androids usually have more power than current iPhones, but iPhones are more homogenous, which makes tuning easier. Also they don't stick around as long (partly because Apple upgrade them into uselessness) so I think the average iPhone is newer than the average Android.
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It certainly doesn't help when (as I witnessed) a salesman tried to persuade someone to drop the iPhone they were considering buying and buy a Samsung using the sales line "With iPhone, you have to buy your apps. With Android, everyone gets them for free.."
There's an eye-opening amount of piracy on iPhone (I was amazed at the numbers), but from what I've read from developers and the numbers in general, it pales in comparison with the piracy rates on Android.
The idea that a large number of people pirate at
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Its kind of scary how when I google for an app for android, for reviews or something, I have to wade through all the pirate site links. Often, the legitimate links are several entries below the pirate links.
And yeah, there's a lot of people at this point (and not FOSS zealots), who will just not pay for software.
At the office, I'm always seeing people who make 150k+ a year balk at the idea of paying 10 bucks for a piece of software they use every day in their side projects, and they pirate it instead. Payin
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Have you tried reporting the pirate links to the application's developer so that the developer can forward a Notice of Claimed Infringement to the pirate site or to the pirate site's ISP?
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Have you tried reporting the pirate links to the application's developer so that the developer can forward a Notice of Claimed Infringement to the pirate site or to the pirate site's ISP?
I thought piracy was OK because it gave free publicity to the creator, and didn't cost them any money because the person pirating wouldn't have bought it anyway, and you'll pay full price for it if it's any good after you've played it a few times, and copyright is evil on principle in the first place?
Or does that only apply to music and movies and other things that most people here only consume rather than create?
I endorse some excuses to infringe, just not those (Score:2)
I personally refuse to endorse the litany of infringement excuses commonly repeated on Slashdot by "information wants to be free" types. But one I will endorse is when the copyright owner either A. cannot be located and contacted or B. refuses to offer a license at a royalty close to the royalty for comparable uses of comparable works. The law at least ought to make statutory damages unavailable in those cases, allowing a reuser to put a reasonable royalty into a trust with which to settle with the copyrigh
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Have you tried reporting the pirate links...
You can play an infinite game of whack-a-mole with these sites.
My wife's an author, and while she had the good grace to just ignore it, I was irritated enough to write polite letters to the first half-dozen sites when pirate book sites started to appear. One actually wrote an apology and took it down. Another replied in broken English to indicate what would happen if I tried to further interfere with his revenue stream (most pirate sites generate revenue in the
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(partly because Apple upgrade them into uselessness) so I think the average iPhone is newer than the average Android.
This claim has been debunked numerous times. This kind of FUD is what makes me wonder why I should bother to listen to anything else the OP has to say.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
There are 100s of Android devices, all with wildly different hardware specs. Just covering the most popular gives you about 25 devices to test, and every one of them will have family-specific bugs to iron out.
Yeah yeah, change the record. If you think this is a big issue then you have never programmed for Windows / web / any operating system that isn't the very brief device-limited situation that iOS is lucky enough to be in. Think how many devices there is possible on the desktop? But we don't whine about that because it's normal there. I suspect you're not a developer, because there is no way that "every" device has specific bugs to work around. That is entirely the point of an operating system... Device bugs happen occasionally but I can count on one hand in my career the times I've had to do it.
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But with Windows, you have no choice because it is installed on 90+ percent of all PCs. If you want to reach more than a few Mac users you need to write for Windows. Android does not have that position. If you are a game company, Apple still commands the vast majority of actual paying app buyers and most Android devices are the low-end variety that don't make great gaming devices. So, sure, a developer COULD support Android - but at greater cost and for lower return than iOS.
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Not denying that it's a valid business choice - just the concept that it's apparently the end of the development world to have to support more devices than you physically can have. That's demonstrably fine for all client development that isn't iOS.
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Nope.
Just an example, when Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released, Ahead Nero had to release an emergency update because their CD burning software simply stopped working on XPSP2, which worked just fine on XPSP1.
Developing for Android is as easy as developing for Windows. Maybe even easier for Android.
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Yeah, because there's only one version of Windows. Nope. Just an example, when Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released, Ahead Nero had to release an emergency update because their CD burning software simply stopped working on XPSP2, which worked just fine on XPSP1. Developing for Android is as easy as developing for Windows. Maybe even easier for Android.
Which would be no different from an app needing to be updated for Android 6.0
The point was that a large variance in hardware is not an excuse.
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If you want to reach more than a few Mac users you need to write for Windows.
Unless your game studio is established enough to qualify for the PlayStation partner program. If so, you can reach users across all PlayStation platforms.
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> programmed for Windows / web / any operating system
I don't know, programming for Windows any time in the last 12 years has been pretty much flat. I could accuse you of being just as unfamiliar as the person you're replying too.
The web, sure, that's another matter. But then your argument boils down to "it's OK for programming on Android to be difficult, because it is on the web too". That's not much of an argument.
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My argument boils down to "Programming is difficult". And if you want any sort of variation in hardware then you're going to have to deal with that variation, or is the One True Apple Solution the only thing that we can aspire to, the only possible client device because we programmers want an easy life?
And yet, it's not that difficult, as I've said before I haven't noticed any difference in speed of development (or burden of maintenance) in the projects I've been working on, so the whole thing is moot.
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If you think this is a big issue then you have never programmed for Windows / web / any operating system that isn't the very brief device-limited situation that iOS is lucky enough to be in.
But we're not talking about Windows or web are we? For Android, there are simply more devices to test and more variation in hardware. For some apps, hardware differences don't matter that much. For gaming though, hardware differences do come into play. Screen differences alone are one variation that game developers have to deal with.
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While I understand what you're trying to say, I argue that there's a fundamental flaw in your analogy.
The difference between windows and android is that windows is a) (More or less) stable, b) You have options to fix problems, and c) people are *used* to having to deal with problems, so when a problem happens people arn't surprised. They just roll their eyes and grunt "Great, not again..."
With android, as an end user you are stuck with what you got. There's (generally) no such thing as modding your androi
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Sorry, should have been more explicit: when I talked about "people not complaining" I mean "developers not complaining" (Well, we do, but dealing with this stuff is part of the job). I feel like you rather prove my point though - whenever you have customisable hardware you have occasional problems and even mature Windows has it.
But you're right in that you have less scope to fix things - atleast there's Cyanogen et al, but still not the same as messing in the registry or Linux scripts to work around an issu
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So as a programmer in the AAA games industry, one of the nicest things about supporting consoles is that they're a fixed target and your development only gets more efficient over time. The API changes almost not at all, your engine settles into place, and your optimization pipeline becomes more refined as time goes on. You make better games at the end of the cycle than at the beginning.
Don't discount the value of a development target that is very consistent. After the first time we build some engine compone
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Yeah yeah, change the record. If you think this is a big issue then you have never programmed for Windows / web / any operating system that isn't the very brief device-limited situation that iOS is lucky enough to be in.
Rubbish! This is the very reason PC games have vast arrays of settings to be able to tune performance from AA, AF, texture resolution, screen resolution, reflection visibility and resolution, physics complexity, HDR, bloom, etc, etc, while consoles don't. PCs have a vast array of potential hardware and capabilities compared to the static hardware of consoles.
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No really, the iPhone 6S's dual core processor equals the galaxy S6's quad core even on geekbench multithreaded. In terms of single threaded performance, the iPhone is nearly twice as fast.
For games, it's single core performance that matters, because one of your cores is always going to be jammed up issuing OpenGL draw calls.
The practice of the situation is that on iOS you can reliably issue 300 OpenGL draw calls per frame - 3000 if you use Metal. On Android, you'll only get about 150, even on very high e
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Is iOS more profitable: iOS are often known as premium system. So they have some extra money they want to pay for this preseved premium. So they will be more willing to pay for such apps. Plus many are still from the iPod days and still have an account to the Apple Store to get their music. Android users are less likely to pay for an app and not give out financial data again.
Is android harder to support: iPhone and iPad are the biggest brand of any one company. Android has a bunch of manufactures and diff
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Slashdotters living in basements have a slightly skewed worldview. You may have noticed.
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Sure it would be more popular with Kids, because it is the platform with all the games. Back in them good old days before mobile devices, parents gave kids designer name brand clothing, shoes designed for sport stars, and that Cabbage Patch Kid better have that logo somewhere or your child will be shamed. The fact that kids use it doesn't mean it is less premium, but the fact the parents are willing to pay extra so their kids can have the best, and not be ridiculed for not being on top of the latest name b
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it's imessage that is the thing. Not sure why imessage is so popular over Skype, sms, or any of the other messaging apps that come out weekly but that is how all the kid
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or 5/ is apple paying developers not to release products for Android? (hint: they were caught paying the developers of plants vs. zombies not to release a version for android)
Re: Why? (Score:2)
They were "caught"? Since when has it been an industry secret that platform owners give incentives to publishers for exclusives? Google is not exactly struggling, it could easily do the same.
Re: Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Is iOS simply more profitable?
For many measures of this yes.
iOS has a much higher percentage of paid (either up front or In App Purchase) revenue, and much higher average revenue per user.
Android revenue by comparison has a much higher proportion of Ad supported, which on a App basis is much lower per device.
Is Android harder to program or support?
Yes to both. With iOS you can nail 90% of devices in sticking to n and n-1 OS version feature sets, and a handful of screen sizes (3.5", 4",4.7",5.5", 7.9", 9.7",
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According to John Carmack, that's basically the first two.
When asked about Android, he usually complains about the poor native (C++) code support compared to iOS and the consoles. Java works well but game developers typically prefer native code for performance reasons. Quote : "It has been a couple months since I said this. I hate the Android mixed java / native build environment SO MUCH."
Back in 2011, when he considered porting Rage to Android, he also mentioned maket limitations (probably gone by now) and
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I think it's the following:
1) Fragmentation of Android platforms. You not only have to test for all the different versions of Android you also have to test on different vendors platforms.
2) The Android SDK is constantly changing on a massive scale and things are being deprecated left and right with almost no downward compatibility, so making a simple app and updating it with fixes becomes an enormous task. Y constantly have throw away code and rewrite and redesign your app when you upgrade the SDK.
3) There
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Is iOS simply more profitable? Is Android harder to program or support? Is code easily portable? Do iOS devices have more hardware resources?
In Order:
Yes.
Yes
Depends
Not necessarily "more"; but certainly "more predictable"
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Is iOS simply more profitable?
Perhaps Android users aren't dumb and/or impulsive enough to fork out for crude graphics on postage stamp-sized screens.
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What percentage of Android devices even uses ART by default, rather than Dalvik?
Hardware (Score:2, Interesting)
Espescially with games, it's where the bigger hardware variety turns around and bites Android in the back.
It's testing on 4 or 5 models vs testing a game on 300 phones.
Add the fact that iOS users are more willing to pay for Apps (they signed up with their credit card already so those 88ct are 88ct only and not 88ct plus signing up with your credit card at a vendor with questionable reputation of making profits with data)
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This is scored "0"? It's actually insightful. CP/M wasn't considered a suitable game platform in the early days of PC gaming because there were a plethora of different CP/M machines with different keyboards, screen resolutions, CPUs, RAM...even different disk drive formats. CP/M wasn't just one platform...it was actually several.
The Commodore 128 was probably the CP/M machine with the most compatiblity with others, that being due to the the 1571 being able to read and write other CP/M disk formats.
Gaming on a phone is painful (Score:2)
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Most games live off a very small minority of people that drops a *LOT* of cash in games due some sort of compulsion, the so called "whales", while the rest just use the free features.
So its not exactly "the world" here.
And probably the whales also tend to buy more expensive, luxury devices like the Apple ones, which would explain the disparity.
Re: Gaming on a phone is painful (Score:1)
Ah, the Whales!
It's interesting to tour the towns of the "top leader board" players of games like Township and Hay Day. What empty lives they must lead, when that's the best they can accomplish with daddy's credit card. You get the feeling they're lonely rich kids trapped in a highrise in Singapore, or Saudi Princesses.
Township is even out for Windows Phone now, btw.
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Angry Birds? Temple Run? The N-Gage?
Obvious troll is obvious. Try updating this chestnut with some games from the last three years and a spectacularly failed platform from the last ten, then it'll be more subtle.
Point-and-click adventures (Score:2)
You could always make/play point-and-click games instead of trying to shoehorn directional-control mechanics onto a positional platform. Point-and-click worked for ICOM (MacVenture series), Activision (Return to Zork), Cyan (Myst), Sierra (King's Quest; Leisure Suit Larry), LucasArts (old Monkey Island), and Telltale (modern Monkey Island). Shoot-em-ups such as AirAttack HD also tend to work well, with the touch screen acting like a laptop's trackpad to move the player's vehicle.
Ideally, gamers would be abl
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Gaming on a phone is a painful experience unless the phone is physically designed for it like the Nokia N-Gage (talk about a throwback).
The fact that hundreds of millions of people worldwide don't consider it a painful experience and your hero device was a spectacular failure that nobody wanted would suggest you're more than a little out of touch.
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Interesting, because the mobile game I play "Castle Clash" which is available for just about every platform under the sun lags behind on iOS compared to Android, by a considerable amount. It can be weeks before updates to the game make it to iOS. On the other hand Amazon which has a smaller user base than iOS gets the updates much faster, usually only a day or two behind Google Play, and sometimes even in advance.
Could it be that the developers just develop on whatever platform they are comfortable with, wh
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Interesting, because the mobile game I play "Castle Clash" which is available for just about every platform under the sun lags behind on iOS compared to Android, by a considerable amount. It can be weeks before updates to the game make it to iOS. On the other hand Amazon which has a smaller user base than iOS gets the updates much faster, usually only a day or two behind Google Play, and sometimes even in advance
Castle Clash and its' ilk are ad supported and freemium no? The likes of them tend to go with platforms that provide more eyes, in this case android (and to certain extent, Fire OS)
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You can do TapJoy on the Google Play, but you would have to spend a *LOT* of time to accumulate even a moderate amount of in game currency. So much that it is not worth the effort unless you are really poor and have insane amounts of free time on your hands.
Therefore you mostly fork out real $$$ for the in game currency. Though you can do a lot completely free to play as well (as I do, not spent a penny).
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It also just plain takes longer to get through the App Store submission process. On Google Play, you can release a new version every hour, if you want.
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How bad is piracy on Android? (Score:3)
I live in Vietnam so everything here is pirated already. How bad is it in the U.S. (and other "developed") countries? Are most apps available (illegally) for free?
Maybe even if they are "pirated" they can still earn revenue for their developers if they earn money through ads. Or have the pirated versions been modified to remove/change the ads?
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Also, I think the fact that Android doesn't limit you to apps from the official app store makes pirating easier. I bought some apps legally (e.g.: through humble bundle) which are delivered as simple apk's. You don't need to be root to install whatever apk you come across.
Future of games? (Score:2)
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As a function of revenue Mobile > Console > PC
Apple's 'no emulator' policy (Score:1)
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::gasps:: are you implying piracy may hurt revenue streams?
Then someone make a clone (Score:2)
Then someone make a clone for Android and you cry a river because people know about it and probably make the money your should have received. knowing nothing about your game on Android when you release it later. see 2048 history
Tetris successfully sued a cloner (Score:2)
Then perhaps you need to get more aggressive at suing cloners like Tetris is [slashdot.org].
It's a phone (Score:1)
He's not wrong, iOS is definitely easier to code for due to the far lower number of devices compared to the user base.
Although, I use my phone as a phone. If I want to play a game, I go home and boot my PC up.
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This. Touch interface sucks for many types of games. When stuck on a long flight I generally end up just playing solitare or 2048, after quickly tiring of the level of focus and frustration from trying to play most everything else. I gave up on data for my phone a few months back, since I so rarely needed it on the go. So I have a quad core bohemoth of a computer in my pocket for phone calls, a few texts, and taking pictures. Luckily I found a phone plan that costs me only $13.41 a month for what I act
Frustration? (Score:2)
No frustration. It's not as if Android is lacking in games after all. And IOS-only games are, well, only available on IOS. Since I have no iphone I never hear about them, and don't miss them.
Interesting point, but meaningless to most (Score:2)
When I run out of games to play on my Samsung, I still won't consider Apple because I think their interface and control-freak issues mostly suck the big one. My company forced me to have one for awhile, so I had two phones. I just recently gave it back because a 'free' phone is worth exactly that; I'd rather pay for my Android than use a free iPhone.
Fortunately, I'm not one of those people who just have to have the latest game or phone so I can be part of the 'in' crowd. I'm happy waiting until my old phone
profit (Score:2)
iOS revenues are ~5X Android for us (Score:3)
I am part owner of an established startup doing mobile games aimed at kids. The decision to support Android was always a contentious one for us, and after years of beating our heads against that wall, I wish we had never done it.
I won't get into value judgments or rhetoric about openness - the revenue on Android just isn't even faintly close to iOS. Maybe 20 cents on the dollar on a *good* day. But as you might guess, it's taken up a lot more than 20% of our time. This fact is sometimes presented with undertones that iOS developers are just greedy, but it's literally a matter of survival - for us, Android simply cannot sustain a viable business.
As far as ease of development: the other comments capture it pretty well; both platforms have a lot of annoyances that you have to work around. Compared to my background developing server applications on Linux, I find both platforms shamefully bug-ridden and slapped together, but I wouldn't say that one is noticeably worse in the big picture.
Mobile gaming sucks (Score:2)
Due to unfortunate Apple's decision to set price minimum to $0.99, both app stores are flooded with dumb repetitive gameplay not worth paying for. They should have set base price at $9.99. Then, if someone manages to sell 100 copies of an interesting hobby game, they can buy themselves a new iPad and get motivated to do more.
Now it could well be that iOS has more copies of Candy Crush than Android, but I am not missing them in any way. What I wish is that Steam had an Android client with cross-platform play
Try being a Windows Phone gamer (Score:1)
Well what else are you going to do with iOS? (Score:1)
But,
It takes all of 5 minutes to run through every possible customization option in iOS, which leaves you turning to games that much quicker in your eternal quest to find more ways to stare at your phone. On Android you have a solid week ahead of you of trying out every possible flavor of the settings and apps that customize your phone. And that's just on the 'legit' app store.
Not denigrati
There's nothing wrong with Android (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
This is to be expected, as there are more Android users. There are more applications, especially free ones, in Google Play.
Re: (Score:2)
I have an iPhone, and when I go looking for games (or any app) I don't look at Google Play. I have a Mac, and I don't search for Windows software either.
Yet Windows and Android software keeps popping up in search results when you use a generic web search engine, such as DuckDuckGo or Bing, to search for reviews of apps in a particular category.