John Carmack, the founder of id Software, made a few AFFIRMATIONS quite interesting a few days ago regarding the Android and iOS platforms. He tells how during the last Quakecon conference he asked the members participating in a session where he was the speaker about the terminals they own. In the room there were as many owners of Android terminals as there were of iOS terminals, which shows how much this platform has grown, but it is normal considering that there are dozens of terminals for it. When he asked how many people spent $20 on a game from the AppStore/Android Market, the situation changed, with iOS terminal owners answering in the affirmative in a larger number than Android owners.
Every six months I'd take a look at the scope of the Android, and decide if it was time to start really looking at it... At the last Quakecon I took a show of hands poll, and it was interesting to see how almost as many people there had an Android device as an iOS device. But when I asked how many people had spent 20 bucks on a game in the Android store, there was a big difference. You're just not making money in the Android space as you are in the iOS space."
For him, things are as simple as possible, iOS is a platform generating substantial income and Android is not. Owners of terminals with iOS buy games and owners of Android terminals do not. For developers, everything boils down to money because nobody works for free and it's normal to be like that. Android currently does not attract enough payers while iOS does. I'm sure that many developers think the same, and this is a big minus for Google, which for the time being does not manage to increase developers' income.
We made more money than people might expect on the Doom RPG stuff. It's just fun to develop on iOS. We'd show people what we were working on and they'd go 'Oh, when are you going to ship that? And I'd say "next month" and they'd go 'Aww, I wanna work on an iPhone title.' It's hard to make a rational business decision to say I want to take resources from something else and put them on this. We did actually hire a person to be our Android guy, but it looks like he's going to get stuck on iOS development!
