The Road Map as it now is . . . . .

[Richard Gaskin]

Colin Holgate wrote:

 > So, Android’s market share of devices doesn’t translate to potential
 > income for app developers, and the wide range of OS releases, and
 > hardware variations, makes it a harder platform to support.

It's true that pretty much every survey on developer revenue from app 
sales favors iOS devs.

But it's also true that mobile is following the same commoditization 
pattern we've seen with every disruptive technology before it, from 
steam engines to automobiles to personal computers.

There's no reason to expect mobile will be any different, and the 
mounting evidence is already suggesting we're more or less at the point 
of commoditization right now:

IDC's latest numbers this week put Android at 84% for Q2 unit sales, 
with Apple at 11%.  Not that much different from what we see on the 
desktop, with Microsoft actually gaining in recent years back up to 91% 
to Apple's 7.8%.

If developers weren't deploying to Android this wouldn't be happening, 
since of course any OS is only as useful as the range of apps it can run.

When we look at the most popular apps on either platform, most of the 
biggest names are shipping for both, with relatively few exceptions.

Roxio reports that they make more money from *sales* on iOS, but that 
they make roughly the same amount of money on Android through 
*advertising*.  Having a lot of eyeballs opens up different paths to 
funding different models for supporting app development.

Sure, just as deploying to Windows means supporting a much wider range 
of hardware than deploying to Mac, including Android in your deployment 
mix will require testing for a broader range of hardware configurations 
than for a vendor that offers fewer choices.

But that doesn't stop the biggest names in the business from deploying 
to both, and with the level of abstraction a high-level tool like 
LiveCode brings to the table it should ideally matter even less to us.

iOS is an important market, and Apple's obviously doing very well with 
their premium market, with solid marketing and supply chain control that 
lets them obtain higher profit margins from their customers than all 
others combined.

But Android isn't going away any time soon either.

It shouldn't be too much to ask for parity between the platforms in 
LiveCode.


 > None of what I’ve said means that LiveCode shouldn’t support Android
 > better!

Exactly.

Fortunately, I think the core team at RunRev understands this, and 
intends to provide parity ASAP.  The biggest challenge seems to be that 
Android is essentially a VM, and LiveCode is essentially a VM as well, 
so it's more challenging for them to deliver the same features with the 
same performance.  But I do believe they intend to, and are working on it.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com