The Android app store will need more than free apps to beat Apple.
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Yesterday on the ComputerWorld blog Preston Gralla listed five reason why the Android app store will beat Apple’s. A more appropriate title would have been “Five reasons why the Android app store will have more apps than Apple’s”. Which, in my opinion, is a pretty ridiculous criteria for judging a beating. Any way, I would like to go some of the points Mr. Gralla made.
I don’t think “Big Brother Censorship” is necessarily a bad thing when it comes to an app store. Not curating the Android app store will indeed lead to there being more apps. The only problem with that is the Android app store is going to get slammed with terrible apps. It is already difficult to find good apps for Android thanks to no quality control. I would prefer to have someone filtering out the bad stuff rather than having to do it myself.
Android definitely needs to get their payment system straightened out. It was a pretty big oversight to use a system that does not account for impulse buys. A majority of my iPhone app purchases are bought on a whim and that is because Apple has made it easy to do. While fixing this is a step in the right direction you still have to offer great apps that people can easily find and want to spend money one.
Gralla says that Android is much more developer friendly than Apple because they do not have the red tape and roadblocks Jobs and company do. While this may be considered developer friendly it is far from end user friendly. From the standpoint of a user I think it is great that Apple doesn’t have an open gate policy. It makes it much easier to find great apps and keeps the overall quality of Apple’s product pretty high.
Over the past few months I have had the opportunity to use both an iPhone and an Android phone. While I tried my hardest to like the Android phone I found searching for apps to be nothing but a frustrating mess. I am sticking with Apple’s app store, no matter how many free apps Android developers want to throw at me.
It will be interesting to see the opinions of the Mobile Orchard community.
