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Originally Posted by murraypaul
There are a huge number of developers on various platforms who give away their code for free.
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Yes, I know that. But can you substantiate your contention that a main reason the Google app store is growing far far faster than the Apple store is due primarily to "a massively larger hobby coder population" as you put it?
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You have to sign up for Apple's development programme at $99 a year. Not noticeable to commercial developers, but offputting to hobby ones.
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Fine, but do you know you also have to pay fees to Google to put apps on their store?
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So, under your logic, why does Linux exist?
Why does the GNU toolset exist?
Why does calibre exist?
They are hard to write, and (at least initially) generated no revenue, so there was no incentive to write them, yes?
Thre is a very large free software community that is happy to give away code for free, even if you don't think that makes sense.
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Aren't Linux and GNU essentially large collaborative projects that evolved over time? I don't know how you can compare those projects with how a developer goes about deciding he'd like to write an app for an app store.
As for Calibre, it exists because of the goodness of Kovid Goyal!
And the fact that free software is developed still doesn't explain why Google Play is outpacing the Apple Store so quickly.
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No it doesn't. It just doesn't.
Each developer is allowed to release more than one app.
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OK but then it involves more investment of development time and effort. More commitment. So the point remains the same.
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Profit is not the only driving force. If you don't see that, I suspect we aren't going to get much further.
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Agreed. Not for everyone at least. And that goes the same for those developing apps for iOS as well. But that doesn't mean my original point still isn't true. And still doesn't explain the huge disparity in growth rate between the two app stores.
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And developers are not free to develop for both A and B, or rather are not free to develop all the same apps on A and B. There are categories of app which cannot be released for iOS.
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Yes, I know there are more restrictions for iOS. But for the vast majority of app categories, there is just as much freedom to code for iOS as there is for Android. For example, most games, alarm clocks, note applications, calculators, etc.
--Pat