I feel these kind of stats will always be flawed for the following reason:
- It doesn't include other devices running iOS (as a developer I look at those too, especially if my app doesn't require Internet).
- It doesn't consider that a big % of Android phones run apps horribly if not at all. Also most of this phone we'll never be easily upgradable to a newer OS version (I don't care if you can do it, I'm talking about for "normal" people), because the carriers and manufactures prefer pushing the new phones that come out every other week.
Not trying to convince anyone. I was just stating that as a developer, I could be interested in more than 50% of the iOS market, and I could be interested in having my application being able to run on as many devices as possible of such market.
That doesn't mean that I wouldn't love to tackle the Android market as well, and we'll definitely do that. But we have limited resources so we chose the one that at the moment generates the most revenues.
No issue with counting iP*d's, that only makes sense. What I was trying to figure out was the big percentage of Android phones that [... or] don't run applications at all". Have a list of those?
I could say the same about Apple's iOS (e.g. you can use hardware not present in all devices, or target APIs that not all devices have (or are even capable of being) upgraded to), and it wouldn't be be an accurate reflection of the real situation there either.
Unless you put numbers on it, then it's an empty statement.
I'd say as a developer, all I care about is a nice niche market to serve with a development environment I enjoy. All of that world domination, battle stuff doesn't interest me very much at all.
He's making at least one very important point: Looking at smartphone market share ignores iPod and iPad. The numbers would be different if it was Google App Store target devices (mainly handsets) versus Apple App Store target devices (significant number of iPads and especially iPod Touches in addition to iPhones).
- It doesn't include other devices running iOS (as a developer I look at those too, especially if my app doesn't require Internet).
- It doesn't consider that a big % of Android phones run apps horribly if not at all. Also most of this phone we'll never be easily upgradable to a newer OS version (I don't care if you can do it, I'm talking about for "normal" people), because the carriers and manufactures prefer pushing the new phones that come out every other week.