Where are all the Android Killer Apps?
June 16th, 2010, 9:08pm by JakeSo Apple has been beat up extensively in the press and in these quarters for their closed, sometimes developer-hostile, rules for their application platform. A new story every week about this rejected app or that one. And always the pundits & myself there to proclaim that this will be Apple’s doom, for the open platforms will win because the apps will be better. And here we are, closing in on 2 years of Android, and we have to ask: where are the killer apps? Sure, Google itself has turned out some stellar applications (Google Maps, GMail), but then it’s their platform and it matters not if the platform is open for them. And there are great apps for Android & the Pre, surely many that top what’s available for iOS or at least match it– FlickrAddict, Dr. Podder & Twee among them– but nothing so earth shattering that it’s given anyone reason to ditch Apple. Now, there’s some multitasking uses where Apple lags, but even with that handicap the Killer App has not arisen.
Then I look at the C|Net list of the top Android apps. And, well, it’s underwhelming. And in games, Android is now far behind webOS, which has used some jujitsu to capitalize on the popularity of the iPhone. Now, you can get apps for just about anything on all 3 modern smartphone operating systems. But where are the killer apps for Android that will make people throw their iPhone away? When will developers take advantage of the freedom afforded by Palm & Google to make truly amazing apps that are better than anything on the iPhone?
June 16th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
I know we started this conversation over here, but I have a couple of thoughts to get things rolling here. Developers focus on iPhone for several reasons, despite their complaining and the relative openness of Android and webOS:
— Lack of Fragmentation in the OS. There are now at least 3 versions of Android in widespread use, and hardware can’t necessarily always run the most recent version. Apple is just getting into this, and it’s going to be an issue with webOS sometime, assuming they get past v1. It’s just that Android is revving much faster in both hardware and OS simultaneously. Developers don’t want to fragment their audience by requiring, say, 2.1 when only a small percentage of the Android world runs it.
— Hardware configurations. To developers, webOS basically has one hardware platform (2 phones), Apple has basically 3 (4 phones, counting iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 3G/original), and Android has about 100 — with and without physical keyboards, different screen geometries, with and without GPS, compasses, gyroscopes, whatever. Developers don’t necessarily want to put in the flexibility to deal with all of them. Easier to write for fewer.
— Fanboys. Yeah, Palm has Precentral, but Apple has about a million sites that constantly review and promote apps. On any given day, my RSS reader is full of new apps I could look at. I’m sure Android and webOS both have something similar, but the Apple Fanboy Network is definitely second-to-none. Word gets around.
— App Store. Apple’s walled garden is also an asset — they have credit card numbers of every iPhone owner, and there’s only one place to buy apps. Develop an app, and you can be sure that millions of people will be able to find it in their one-stop shop. And there’s a strong culture of paying money for apps on iPhone — not necessarily so with other platforms, especially outside the US, where it’s frequently impossible to buy apps at all.
In the end, these 3 OSes are similar enough for most end users that they’ll use whichever has the apps they want. It’s here that webOS is getting left behind. When somebody like Dropbox wants to develop a mobile app, they first do iPhone, then if they’re successful, Android, and maybe someday webOS. Frankly, this is a big reason I wouldn’t buy a webOS phone right now. For small-scale developers, this effect is even stronger. The developer of Instapaper sums it up nicely on their support page:
June 17th, 2010 at 12:10 am
The bottom line is that Apple, with all of their highly publicized restrictions, gives developers enough freedom to make plenty of good apps. Android’s openness doesn’t guarantee better apps, but it let’s developers play where Apple won’t. As Steve famously tells us, if you want porn, you’ll have to go elsewhere. Android lets you replace the homescreen, install alternate browsers and virtual keyboards, run background apps like podcatchers, weather widgets, etc. Are any of these considered “killer apps?” I don’t know what’s considered a killer app on any platform. I guess the iPhone’s Facebook app, maybe. Certainly, it’s way better than the webOS or Android ones.
So obviously, there’re plenty of things about the App Store that’s extremely dev friendly, such as the huge installed base, the mature and powerful API’s, the billing system, all the things that Mike talked about. For those reasons alone, the iPhone gets the most resources. Are there advantages to the WebOS and Andoid developer environments? Sure, but in most ases, not enough to overcome the disadvantages. I will note that BofA recently released a native WebOS app (a port of their web app web page). That brings webOS on par with the iPhone for me :).
June 17th, 2010 at 6:37 am
Yeah, I agree that I guess I don’t know what would constitute a killer app, either. At this point, it seems like most people (around here) think their phone does what they want it to do, and aren’t really pining away for some missing functionality.
June 17th, 2010 at 10:32 am
The killer app on iPhone 1.0 was the iTunes player & modern web browser. Google Maps was it for Treo-generation phones, and email for the early Blackberries. Now, everyone can check those boxes. Games sell some iPod Touches. GMail, Google Voice & Google Maps sell some Android phones. Otherwise, it seems like hardware is what gets the attention.
Maybe there are no more killer apps left to be made for the smartphone… after the spreadsheet & word processor drove adoption, there was nothing really driving new adoption of PCs until the internet changed everything. We could be at that point again.
June 18th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
More thinking along the lines that App silo’s suck– Yes, once you cross some threshold of functionality (“check those boxes”), I think you are both right, the apps have a diminishing return. It’s not the number of apps that’s important, it’s having the right apps that matter. For the most part, I think Android is there or getting there, and webOS, well, it seems as good as it’s ever going to get. That’s where the vague future of webOS hurts it in the public eye– the perception that webOS will never reach that point of adequacy. Apple and Android have Audible support, webOS doesn’t and probably never will.
Today, I was annoyed to find that I can only buy a Guild comic book from iTunes (as a standalone app)– with the PDK, it would probably take 30 minutes to port the app to webOS. But my prediction is that it would show up on Android first, if it ever leaves the Apple ecosystem. Just let me buy the damn comic on the web! Even make it flash-based if you think it would prevent piracy.
June 18th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
That’s where HP’s deep pockets could help, even more so than Palm’s app race. Instead of a contest, take $10 million and pay companies like Audible & Guild $10K to port their apps. Originally Palm wanted a focus on quality over quantity, but were overcome by reality when the size of the App Store became such a big issue along w/ Apple’s closed ecosystem. But lately, the app store size thing seems to have faded away, as the meme creeps a lot less into the mainstream press.
So Palm should pay developers to check the needed boxes. And I think they should dedicate some serious resources into developing that one killer app themselves. Something not easily cloned in a weekend for the iOS & Android.
June 18th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
“Originally Palm wanted a focus on quality over quantity.”
Did they really? To me, it seemed like they wanted to switch the conversation to quality over quantity, but there was never any mechanism for ensuring quality (eg, rejecting poor apps from the catalog). In fact, openness of the catalog criteria has always been a stated goal of Palm’s. Maybe their strategy was to mandate quality by limiting the access of the early SDK to quality devs, but if at any point they thought the SDK was ready but intentionally limited distribution, that was a HUGE mistake. I actually can’t believe Palm is moving so slow with the PDK. Other than the launch partners, no one has PDK apps out, and it’s been 6 months. As far as bribing developers directly, sounds like a good idea, but there’s such a thin tail, it’d be pretty hard to identify any apps that would actually sell devices. Certainly, the flavors-of-the-week IMO would be ABC, Netflix, Kindle, Audible (probably not the Guild). Palm/HP are going to have another $1m contest for PDK apps once v1.4.5 comes out, and I think that will be pretty effective, giving anyone with a relatively popular iPhone app an incentive to devote the hrs necessary for porting.
An in-house developed killer app (like they did with Facebook), seems like a great idea, and something I had hoped for for the AT&T launch, my thinking being that AT&T would not have been interested in the Pre/Pixi as they were. But if Palm has a trick up its sleeve, it’s certainly taking its time.