Android App Market Outpaces Apple Apps - May Overtake by 2012

[gadgetrants]

I can see this isn't the smiley-happy thread it started out as...but the evolution toward an Apple-Android pissing contest was maybe just a matter of time.

The comparisons are old, tired, and probably futile (it's a matter of opinion, not fact). Please don't say "this app is better than that app" until there is an even playing field between devices and companies. At the least, any comparisons are premature until Android gets a few more years of growth. Let's all come back in 3 or 4 years, and then let the debate begin!

-Matt

I'm sorry but I have to disagree, Andy has had plenty of time to get the apps that it shares with apple to be on even footing. I would agree with you if a brand new app came out for apple and it had a poor port to android sometime later. But some of these apps that Andy has have been out for over a year and they still don't function as well as their apple brothers.

I can see that I should have been more precise: when I said 3-4 years, I didn't mean time alone. There is a pretty big gap between the Android and Apple ecosystems, particularly in terms of how the markets/stores operate, incentives to developers, hardware and OS uniformity (oh no, a reference to the dreaded "fragmentation" problem!!!), and so on.

In all seriousness, you raise a good example, and it reflects a very fair assumption: why don't equivalent apps on each OS work equally well? I don't have any experience with that issue (except maybe...Angry Birds?...), so I'm anything but an authority on the question. You're probably right. But give me 10 minutes and I can easily think up 4 or 5 reasons why it's not really a fair comparison, and why evaluating Android and its app ecosystem during its infancy is still too early.

-Matt