I’ve been increasing finding myself too busy to share anything but the short, sharp tidbits I’ve been sending to Twitter, but here are a few stats to refer back to next time I need to answer a question about Android vs iOS. Short answer: Android has minuscule tablet marketshare and far less influence in the phone space too.
Here’s some data from the 2013 Thanksgiving holiday in the US. It shows that those with Android spend about 20% less money each on average, and about six times as many people use iOS for shopping as use Android. Remember than iOS is iPad + iPhone, but there’s a huge gap there. There’s also some more granular data in the article, showing iPhones are still responsible for about 20% more sales than Android phones, and sales from Android tablets are about 1/10 of sales from iPads.
That leads nicely into this digital publishing tale from Mumbrella. They published a weekly iPad magazine, which has just closed down after peaking at around 1000 sales per month. They started as iPad-only, and then against the advice of their digital solution provider (Oomph, a fairly big player in the Australian market) they pursued an Android version too. It apparently wasn’t worth the effort, topping out at 48 downloads on Android (about 1/20 of the iPad version) and once as few as six downloads.
While the usage gap in phones is smaller, the gap between iPad and everything else in the market is cavernous. A big difference between the iPad and the web is that people actually design for the iPad’s known, predictable screen size. It’s like print. Designing for Android is either like designing for the web, or living with black bars on the sides. While there are plenty of reasons to embrace web-style design, many print designers simply aren’t as comfortable with it, at least not yet. A known space can be fully exploited in the same way a print design can.
Today, there seems to be little reason to bother with an Android version of an iPad app. Instead, make a good website that everyone can use, and extend that experience with a more interactive iPad version. If you do produce an Android version, be ready for very few people to download it. It looks like cheap Android tablets are probably being used to watch TV and for basic web surfing — and not very much for apps.