MOBILE |
MOBILE
Making a choice of which platform to pick for your mobile app is not an easy task. Unfortunately, the reason behind this is not that the market is saturated with a wide variety of platforms, but that the two choices you have are different which is not on a technical basis, but also in the type of customers they cater to. If you have not been living under the rock for the past decade, you should know that I am talking about iOS and Android. And while at first glance the later has a larger pool of users, there are reasons why the iOS not only manages to solidify its position but also continue to constantly innovate.
First thing first, let’s look at the audience you want to be targeting. IoS is highly sought after in the US, Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Those countries have one thing in common, they are all pretty rich and subsequently, their users tend to have more money to spend on apps than their counterparts in other parts of the world. Android users might not have pockets as deep but it is balanced by the fact that basically rest of the world are Android users.
By no means is Android devoid of people who dont mind spending a few bucks on the apps. But due to this group dynamic, Android has adopted a different way to monetize their apps. You are much more likely to find free apps there, but this comes with a caveat. Since iOS users are more likely to straight up pay for the products, they tend to be more aggressive to advertisements in it. Fair enough, you don’t purchase something so that it can tell you what else to buy.
This is however not the case with Android since you get a bigger choice of free apps, you are also less likely to have an issue with advertising. This is basically the price you pay for free products. In addition to this, Android users know that with the free app, comes the limitations of not being able to fully use all the features. You get the taste of products and if you want to fully benefit from it then you have to purchase it.
On a technical level approaches seem to diverge as well. While both platforms strive for technical innovation, iOS tend to be more focused in their approach and some would argue more successful. Because of this focused approach, the platform is less fragmented than Android and you are less likely to spend much time on tinkering with your app so that I can run smoothly on a different iteration of iOS.
Android apps are much more open to manipulation. While this is good for Smartphone companies, which can optimize Android to their specific needs and uses , this leads to a much more fragmented platform, where in order to cover all of it, you will have to spend much more time on optimizing the app for iterations of the system. This openness does benefit app users though. Not only does Android have a lower threshold for verifying new apps, but due to the fully automated system, the process is also faster.
In the end, the choice you will make will depend on the type of application you have, how much work you are willing to put into optimizing it further, whether you want to be paid upfront, or willing to go for more long term benefit and obviously which location and demographics you want to target. Easy choice to make would be to put your app on both platforms, but due to resources required to run it effectively on two markets, it may not be viable for everyone.
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