There was cold beer, hot pizza and shop talk at a recent informal gathering of Android programmers in downtown Manhattan. Inevitably the chatter turned to money.
One software developer, James Englert, 26, had just released his first application for Android, Google’s operating system for cellphones. When asked, he tossed out an estimate for his take from sales of the app, a simple program that shows train schedules: “US$1 to US$2 per day.”
The room erupted with laughter.
“That’s pretty good money,” he protested over the clamor.
The others could relate to Englert’s situation because writing Android software is not yet a ticket to financial success. Even as Android sales surge — Google says it is now activating about 200,000 phones a day — the market for Android apps still seems anemic compared with that for Apple and its thriving App Store.
Experts and developers say that is in part because the Android Market, the dominant store for Android apps, has some clunky features that can be annoying to phone owners who are eager to make a quick purchase. For starters, Android uses Google Checkout rather than an online payment system that more people are familiar with, like PayPal. As a result, many Android developers make their apps available free and rely on mobile advertisements to cover the cost.
“It’s not the best impulse-buy environment,” said Matt Hall, co-founder of a developer outfit called Larva Labs that makes games for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry devices. “It’s hard to think of an application that you would sit there and put your credit card information in for.”
However, that tide is starting to turn as Android’s popularity continues to swell and Google takes steps to smooth out some of the wrinkles. For example, the Android Market recently began showing app prices in a user’s local currency, rather than that of the developer.
“We’re still seeing the 1.0 version of the ecosystem,” Google vice president of engineering and one of the primary architects behind Android Andy Rubin said. “We think about it every day, how to minimize some of the friction to help the ecosystem rise with the platform.”
Rubin said there were 270,000 developers writing software for Android and the number of programs available for download in the Android Market has swelled to more than 100,000, a threefold increase since March.
Developers can feel the shift in momentum. “I used to tell people I wrote software for Android and they’d look at me like I had three heads,” said Michael Novak, who handles Android development at the mobile advertising software company Medialets and helps organize the monthly New York Android Software Developers Meetup. “That wasn’t even a year ago. Now everyone knows what it is. The popularity has exploded.”
Perhaps the biggest point of friction for Android is the same thing that led to its success.
Because Google makes its software available free to a range of phone manufacturers, there are dozens of different Android-compatible devices on the market, each with different screen sizes, memory capacities, processor speeds and graphics capabilities. An app that works beautifully on, say, a Motorola Droid might suffer from glitches on a phone made by HTC. iPhone developers, meanwhile, need to worry about only a few devices: iPhones, iPods and iPads.
When Rovio, the Finnish software development company behind the popular iPhone game Angry Birds, decided to release a version for Android, the company spent months testing the game on a variety of devices to make sure it was up to par.
“It’s so fragmented,” said Peter Vesterbacka, a developer at the company. “It’s a lot more challenging than developing for one device, like the iPhone.”
Google says it eventually hopes to introduce a transaction feature for Android software that will allow purchases within apps, to help developers make more money.
Developers do say that the freedom of Android is a welcome alternative to Apple’s tight control. Android developers have more rein to tinker with the phone’s native functions, like the address book and the basic interface, something Apple has not always allowed. And Apple screens all apps before they can reach its store, while Google imposes no such restriction, relying on Android users to flag malicious or offensive apps.
“With Apple, you can spend months writing software only to be denied,” Novak said. “The biggest reward as a developer is getting your software out there and quick. That makes everything else worthwhile.”
Developers are not abandoning iPhone for Android. Instead, they say they are slowly starting to devote more resources to Android in the hope that those efforts will pay off.
They also note that it is a lot easier to stand out in a pool of 100,000
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