I’m sure I’m not the only person who has looked at the Android Market and been disappointed at the dearth of high quality games in there (don’t get me wrong, there are a few there, but they’re a tiny percentage of the total games in the market) . Well, I recently stumbled across an intriguing article on the Gamasutra site by Android OS developer, Derek James. In the article, Derek discusses the pros and cons of developing in Android and details why he feels there hasn’t been a rush of development companies eager to develop games for the Android phone platform as yet.
On the plus side, according to Derek, are-
- the use of Java to program for Android, compared to Apple’s use of the less programmer friendly (in his opinion), Objective C
- the comparitively low cost of getting things published in the Android Marketplace (a flat $25 fee compared to Apple’s $99 per year distribution fee)
- the less restrictive review process used by Google for Android apps- games go live straight away, where iPhone apps go through a rigourous review process which can take weeks to navigate through
On the flip side, Derek argues the following negatives-
- low number of Android handheld owners compared to iPhone users – a paltry 3 million compared to iPhone’s estimated 45 million users
- the low number of those Android users willing to shell out money to buy apps (just 19% of Android users bought apps compared to 50% of iPhone users according to AdMob’s July report)
- Piracy -it’s much easier to distribute pirated software for Android than the much more restrictive iPhone.
- The different hardware specs of the various Android handsets – eg some may have much larger screen resolutions, others may not have a trackball or physical keyboard.
Derek seems to have a positive outlook for Android’s future, but his article raises some excellent points. The lack of hardware standardisation (and possibly even user interface standardisation) could lead to headaches for developers who may have to consider accomodating wildly differing phone specs when creating their apps; unless the market proves to be more lucrative than it currently is, there will be little to entice developers to spend time with such considerations. Then there’s the Android Market itself; don’t get me wrong, I like that it’s open, but when every second app is a soundboard or a selection of pics of Japanese Girls, it’s difficult to get your app noticed in the crowd.
But what, if anything, can be done? In my opinion, to get the market going, the incentives need to be greater for would-be developers to make the switch to Android. The Android Developers Challenge is all well and good, but even it can’t be enough to convince a development team to take the risk of putting the man hours into creating a high quality, biggish budget game; given the apparent lack of purchasing being done by Android users, if they didn’t win the cash prize for their given category, there would be no guarantees that they may ever break even on their project. Perhaps the marketplace will see a large rise in sales as more Android handsets start to appear, but the low percentage of app-buying Android users so far would seem to suggest that this won’t be the case. It would be interesting to know just how often pirated apps are being used, it may be that by tightening anti-piracy measures, the apps market may see a rise in sales.
I’d be interested to hear from any of the game developers out there, mostly to find out if sales have been lower than expected and what they’re trying to do to counter this. I know that some developers have been lowering the price of their apps (Pocoro for example is now down to €0.99 in an effort to build sales).
To read Derek James’ Gamasutra article in full, click here.