Mereja

Author: Mark Murphy

  • Android and iPhone: A Tale of Two Articles

    On what should have been a quiet Saturday, a pair of reviews/articles showed up online that provide an interesting counterpoint to Ray Walters’ The Android Army is Rising post.

    On the one hand, we have Jason Kincaid’s The Switch From iPhone To Android, And Why Your First Impression Is Wrong, appearing in TechCrunch. Mr. Kincaid makes what should be an obvious point, but one that gets overlooked a lot — your past experience has an impact on your view of the present. The crux: long-time iPhone users will need some time to get used to Android, and off-the-cuff reviews don’t give reviewers that kind of time. This is no different than if, say, I were to try a Palm Pixi for a day or two and offer up a review, as it would take me more time than that to truly appreciate the differences between WebOS and Android.

    On the other hand, we have “Boy Genius” (not sure his real name) and Google Android Personal Thoughts, appearing in his Boy Genius Report blog. This article shreds Android to bits. Some of his complaints are valid and oft repeated in Android-land, such as the limitations of the Android Market. Some of his claims are unprovable (e.g., “No one gives a crap about their Android phone, there’s zero emotional attachment” with nary a sign of a statistically-valid survey to back up the point). Some of his claims may be provably false (e.g., much of his rant on the icon sizes is false for Android 2.0.1, and I can replicate the experiment on the 2.1 SDK once it arrives).

    The thing that struck me the most about the two pieces, though, were their respective tones. The pro-Android TechCrunch article was calm, professional, and fairly succinct. The anti-Android screed comes across like the worst of the “Android Army” rants that Mr. Pogue complained about — I can almost feel the spittle coming out of my monitor. Had the tones been reversed, I would have been upbraiding Mr. Kincaid. As it stands, Boy Genius is welcome to reach his target audience however he wishes.

    The point is that, for Android to succeed, we need more sane discourse and fewer rants and diatribes. This is why I railed against those launching personal attacks and spamming Android Market comments in the Cyanogate mess from 2009. I know that the “Android Army” modus operandi is sexy, and I’ve been known to brandish a verbal gun myself from time to time — I am trying my level best to improve. But ordinary people will not be impressed with an unruly mob, if that’s what Android fans come across as.

    We can do better than that. We have to do better than that.


  • Outstanding Platform Versions

    Outstanding Platform VersionsGoogle is now publishing a page outlining the platform versions in use, as measured by requests to the Android Market. In terms of Android Market statistics, this chart is…limited. However, it is interesting, and it will be even more interesting to see how frequently the chart gets updated.

    The first thing that catches my eye is how many DROID users have gotten the upgrade to 2.0.1. That upgrade had been out for not much more than a week by the time the statistics were culled.

    The 27.7% of users running Android 1.5 means developers should still try to support that release for the time being, if possible. I suspect this figure will plummet to under 10% sometime in March, as I am hopeful we will see upgrades for the HTC Hero and Motorola CLIQ in the not-too-distant future.

    Of course, if the Nexus One ships (per rumors) and if it has Android 2.1 (per other rumors), developers will be faced with having to deal with four major active releases (1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1), and I will seriously start questioning the sanity of various executives in Mountain View, CA…

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  • Rethinking Android App Piracy

    Every couple of weeks, somebody posts a link to some site that offers free pirated downloads of paid Android apps. Hacking a handful of phones to automatically slurp down the latest stuff on the Market is almost trivial, so this sort of thing will happen regularly.

    The question is, what should the average developer do about it?

    First, think about it with a level head. Yes, finding your stuff pirated raises emotions. No, being emotional when making business decisions is not a good idea — and dealing with piracy needs to be first and foremost a business decision.

    I would start by ensuring you have a handle on the problem. Assuming your application needs or can justify the INTERNET permission, hook up with Flurry or some other analytics provider and start collecting data on the use of your app. I suspect that few pirated copies somehow attempt to disable such logging. Comparing the number of unique users reported via analytics and the number of unique users you get from the Android Market and other channels will give you a sense for how many pirated copies of your app are in use.

    For the sake of argument, let’s say you have determined there are ~10,000 active users of pirated copies of your app. Considering there are only a few million Android devices in use, 10,000 would be substantial.

    Next, you need to make an estimate of how many of those users would have found your application through traditional channels and elected to pay for it. Each of those is a significant hurdle, as there is no assurance that users of pirated apps are going to meander the Market much to find legitimate apps, let alone buy them.

    Let’s say that there’s a 30% chance that a pirated-app user would have found your app in a legit channel and another 30% chance that those who find it would pay. Both of those percentages feel generous to me, as app “findability” is a big-time problem in mobile and paying anything for an app is a non-trivial barrier. But, with those odds, you have actually “lost” 900 sales (10,000 x 30% x 30%). And, let’s say you are netting 0.65 USD per sale after Market fees and such.

    That means, for all those pirates, you’re really out $585, regardless of how many legit sales you have. Obviously, you will need to tailor all of these numbers for your own price and so on.

    So, the question then becomes: what is the best use of your time? If closing down piracy is super-easy for you, such that you can take care of it just a few hours, it’s probably worth doing. If, on the other hand, trying to stop piracy of your app will take a lot of time and effort, you might consider whether you will do better devoting that time toward more marketing (increasing exposure and, therefore, legitimate sales) or towards an improved app (increasing the odds of purchases and, therefore, legitimate sales) or towards a business model that lets you distribute the app for free, so piracy is no longer an issue and might even be beneficial.

    What you do not want to do is just jump into a long drawn-out battle against the pirates based on pure emotion instead of the facts of your business. Every hour you spend fighting piracy is an hour you lose for things that, hopefully, matter more to you, such as family, friends, or football (of the round or oblong variety).

    Similarly, re-check your analysis from time to time. As Android grows, piracy may grow, and there may come a time when it becomes fruitful for you to invest the time, even if it does not make much sense today.

    If you are interested in a more substantial analysis of why the effective price of your app will head to zero over time, I heartily recommend Mike Masnick’s posts on the Grand Unified Theory of the Economics of Free, also collected in his limited-edition book Approaching Infinity.

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