Nearly half of the top free and paid iPad apps are unavailable for Android tablets, underlining the fact that most apps come to Apple’s iOS mobile platform months or years before they arrive on Android and many of them never make it to Android at all. Of the most popular iPad apps on the market, thirty percent are not available for the Android platform at all, while another eighteen percent are available for Android phones with no Android tablet version. If anything, the app ch asm is getting worse for Android even as Android tablet marketshare grows.
The tablet app data from Canalys is explainable by two separate problems besieging the Android tablet market. The first is that developing Android apps is exceedingly difficult due to the fragmented hardware across the platform; app developers have to write the “Android version†of their app a hundred times or more in order to make it compatible with the hundreds of randomly varying Android hardware models from dozens of vendors, none of whom have any quality or consistency guidelines they’re required to follow. That stands in sharp contrast with the fact that app developers only have to write their iOS apps a handful of times: once for the iPad, once for the current iPhone, and perhaps once more for the older shorter iPhone.
The second problem is the fault not of Android hardware makers, but of Android users themselves. Android users are far less likely to spend any money on apps than their iPad counterparts, taking away the financial motivation for app developers to want to even bother making an Android version. Many popular free apps only exist in the hopes of being able to upsell a fraction of those users to a more advanced paid version. And the unwillingness of Android users to open their wallets for apps means there’s little incentive for app makers to crank out an Android version other than to silence the complainers.
Instagram came to Android nearly two years after it had been available on the iPhone and iPad. Popular mobile game Dots just came to Android this week, four months after it came to iPhone and iPad. The trendy video app Vine had a six month gap before its Android version arrived. And the Canalys list reveals that such waits are the norm at least as often as not.
With the startling lack of popular free or paid apps available for Android tablets, why do people keep buying them? Ostensibly, because while many of them are junk hardware with substandard specs, they come with exceedingly low price tags. But those are the last people who are going to turn around and spend any money on apps, which is why such a high percentage of mobile app developers don’t bother with Android at all â€" regardless of marketshare.
Google hopes to fix the lack of popular apps on its Android platform by offering more competent Android devices like the Nexus 7 tablet. But as long as it continues also licensing the Android platform to mercenary vendors looking to crank out the cheapest junk possible, app developers will continue to treat Android users â€" and particularly Android tablet users â€" as second class citizens.
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