Quite interesting stuff:
Esp. as the second most, Symbian, is the combined amount of all Symbian devices. To me as small indie developer it means: Stick to the iPhone. Not worth having the hassle of supporting a large amount of semi working Nokia devices and trying to get a game running smooth and look same on all those different devices.
So to me it seems all other markets except iPhone are not really interesting to put much effort in. What do you think?
Fully agree
The second most interesting market, just due to the high degree of standardization and strong dev tools, to me is win mobile, followed by android. But for game dev with the target to generate at least something from selling, its the iphone and the iphone only at the time.
Android just needs more real users that are willing to pay and palm takes another half decade to get anywhere, assuming they survive their definitely lost war with the USB consortium without too much damage.
I could see Windows Mobile becoming a major player in the near future.
MS seems to be really into wanting to integrate their whole experience. From Windows desktop, to XBOX, to Mobile, etc…
I would imagine that a strong push from them will be coming within the next year or two. It wouldn’t be that bad an idea to have some apps ready when they do.
At the time it wouldn’t make any sense.
Win Mobile 6 devices commonly are more than just slightly insufficient for anything in relation to unity.
They are intend for business people not gamers.
On the other hand, I personally expected that MS would use Zune HD to finally get out of the dark but I guess Zune can officially be declared as “good idea that never will take off”. Here in switzerland you will even have a hard time to find any of those, guess if it is selling anywhere at all, its USA.
It’s all well played marketing.
The statistics do not represent handset sales or unique devices in the market, rather they represent the relative mobile usage we see from the sites and apps in our network. This means that devices with heavy mobile usage (like the iPhone) have higher share than other devices.
http://metrics.admob.com/2009/09/august-2009-mobile-metrics-report/
It depends. Developing for the other platforms could well be a case of “more share of a smaller market”. Take Mac games, for example. Yes, there are far more Windows users, but because of that there are also far more competitors for that market share. Mac has a smaller install base, but also less competition.
I tend to think the iPhone is basically becoming the same way. Huge market… but so much competition, unless you are either extremely niche or lucky, all you are going to get is a small portion of it.
If these other platforms barely have any competition on them, perhaps they are worth developing for. Sometimes it is better to have a large controlling share in a small market than a near-nonexistent share in a huge market.
I could be wrong, though. Kind of depends on how many users of each platform actually buy apps. Part of what makes the iPhone so lucrative is that pretty much every owner buys an app at some point. I doubt the other platforms can claim the same.
True. Apple has made it a point to market the ability to download apps. “There’s an app for that” is ingrained in peoples’ brains.
Mac works as a platform due to the attitude of mac users. They are willing to pay for stuff.
That this is just too true is shown by the android. Even the top 10 apps there require months to earn their development costs if they had such (search for the article from the trism devs on that), while it takes literally hours on the iphone if they reach such high ranks.
Its just a matter of facts that any other mobile platform to day is worlds away sales force wise. the userbase on its own won’t do it, you need users that are also willing to invest money, not linux users on a mobile as on android …