Seems fine to me. No money being made, no money to pay for development. I don't blame this on Android phones or users, however.
(Bandwidth is, sadly, becoming a big issue these days, because nobody offers unlimited plans anymore. 5GB per month means one max-size app and maybe a few text messages before you start paying one billion dollars per nanobyte in overages. It's like 1980s long distance all over again.)
"I don't blame this on Android phones or users, however."
You might not, but Mika Mobile sure sounds like it does.
"I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through. We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink."
"I don't blame this on Android phones or users, however."
I am forced to call you out on this misinformation. It is the Android _phones_ and _users_. Android based platforms like the Nook Color and Amazon Fire both have good app revenue in my experience. Android phone revenue is at the bottom for the apps I sell. Of course, iOS is at the top.
I'm willing to listen to any counter-points you may have to back up your claim that it's not the Android ecosystem. Fire away.
Cross out phones (which I read as phone makers not "android") and users and you have Google left.
Which makes sense since many of the cited disadvantages ultimately lie with Android and Marketplace implementation decisions made by Google.
I'm not sure Andy Rubin would disagree much either but what he might say candidly is Google takes the long view. And the long view is that Google Play today is far ahead of the Marketplace two years ago and in 2 years it will be ahead of where they are now by an even larger margin. And the same thing with development tools. And the userbase advantage will be even larger.
Apple caps 3g app downloads at 30mb I think. Any bigger than that and you need to use wifi or sync via iTunes.
It would be nice if Google would implement something like this for Android. I didn't even know about this limitation until today ( I'm an iPhone user/developer).
Android App store warns you that you are about to start a large download via 3G and asks if you're sure you want to do so. Personally I find that a much better approach. Apple doesn't know the details of my contract and if I want to download 70 (or 170)MB over 3G, surely that's my prerogative and why should my phone stop me?
I have unlimited 3G data plan on my iPad and it always hated that Apple won't let me update some apps until I'm near WiFi spot... until I bought Galaxy Nexus inserted SIM from my phone with limited data plan and it exceeded my capped data plan in the first hour (OS updates).
(Bandwidth is, sadly, becoming a big issue these days, because nobody offers unlimited plans anymore. 5GB per month means one max-size app and maybe a few text messages before you start paying one billion dollars per nanobyte in overages. It's like 1980s long distance all over again.)