[OT] iPhone is for games, Android is for apps.

[Bob Sneidar]

Hi Mark. This is a rebuttal of the article, and not of your opinion, which I value as a general rule. 

So then, how odd then am I, who never play any of the games on my iPhone, and use  the apps a TON! As with all "studies" I would have to get into the details of how the study was done before I would accept their findings, and I just don't want to do that. 

But as an example of how this sort of thing can be skewed, one of the old arguments for Windows and against Mac, was that there were way more software titles for Windows than there was for the Mac. This was unarguably true, except that no one ever thought to ask, "Do Windows users but/install more software than Mac users?" Which would beg the question, what KIND of software do each class of users buy. 

The far more useful question to ask would have been, "Is there more mainstream software titles in the primary categories of most used software than there are for the Mac?" or "Is there any primary categories of software that are not available to Mac users that are available to Windows users?"

In other words, what can you do on a Windows box with mainstream software that you cannot do on a Mac? That there are 50 titles of FTP clients is irrelevant. People are going to get one, and perhaps two. Can you FTP on a Mac? Sure! Are there choices? Sure! 

So the argument is moot. What Windows IS good for is specialty apps where the target market is very small, so a large market base is the only justifiable conditions where a developer would want to take the risk. Call Accounting for Radio stations is an example. 

If the numbers crunched in this article (and I have not read it so I am speaking hypothetically here) all came from 2011, a time when the economy was suffering, and by which time just about anyone who WAS going to buy an iPhone did, and got the apps they wanted in 2010 and before, then the study is again, irrelevant, except as a way to say that the current trends of mobile apps purchasing has swung towards Android, and away from iPhone. But you would expect that, given that the Android entered the market a couple years after the iPhone, and the app market for Android didn't really gain momentum until some time later. 

Hence, the article title, "iPhone is for games, Android is for apps" is terribly misleading, and I believe intentionally so. I HATE that kind of journalism. So many people will look at the article title, see there are a bunch of numbers, and conclude why it must be so! Very few people really think the problem through, or take such articles with the grain of salt I always do. So the masses are affected, and the agenda of the publisher is achieved. What a world. <sigh>

Bob


On Dec 23, 2011, at 9:56 AM, Mark Wieder wrote:

> via Good Morning Silicon Valley... Two new reports out this week.
> 
> "The first, a report by Xyologic, finds that “iPhone is for games, Android is
> for apps.” It found that of the top 150 downloads in November from the Apple App
> Store, 100 were games, and game downloads outnumbered app downloads by nearly a
> 3-1 margin (71.5 million to 25.6 million)."
> 
> <http://www.xyologic.com/blog/the-top-25-iphone-and-android-app-publishers-in-2011-iphone-is-for-games-android-is-for-apps/>
> 
> "Apple users certainly spend more money on apps. That was the finding in a
> second study, by analysis firm Distimo, that compared the top 200 apps in both
> the Apple and Android markets."
> 
> <http://www.distimo.com/blog>
> 
> -- 
> Mark Wieder
> 
> 
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