Android is a mess, say developers
A new survey analyzes the pros and cons of writing for various mobile platforms — On the heels of the debate played out over the weekend between Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson and Instapaper's Marco Arment about whether it's wiser to be writing apps for Apple's …
Context & Ripple Effects
The complaint is old but the stakes keep rising: back in December 2007, Ars Technica already called developing for Google Android a mixed bag, and by August 2010 Royal Pingdom was documenting why Android developers were losing money for reasons unrelated to piracy. What changed by early 2011 is that the argument went mainstream: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Instapaper's Marco Arment spent the weekend debating publicly whether apps should be built for Apple's platform first, and Fortune's new survey hands Arment's side fresh ammunition.
The timing matters because Android was being pushed hard as the next big target — Scobleizer argued just a month earlier that developers should build for Android tablets now. A survey saying the platform is 'a mess' lands directly against that pitch, at the moment when small developers are choosing which ecosystem gets their scarce engineering time.
First-order effects
- Developers weighing iOS-first versus cross-platform strategies now have survey data backing the position Arment took against Wilson — that Apple's smaller but paying user base beats Android's scale, given documented monetization shortfalls.
- Google faces immediate reputational pressure on developer relations: the 'mess' label attaches precisely as it tries to recruit tablet-app builders ahead of its hardware partners' launches.
Second-order effects
- Expect Google to respond on the friction points the survey exposes — Market checkout, payment conversion, and device-fragmentation tooling — because without those fixes, the reach argument Wilson makes can't overcome the revenue gap Royal Pingdom quantified in 2010.
- Apple benefits as the default revenue platform, though its own friction is real: the confirmed 201-day App Store review for a single app shows the walled garden's cost, which Android advocates will cite back.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile development bifurcates structurally: iOS as the profit center where premium apps launch first, Android as the volume channel ported to second — determining which categories of software even get attempted on each platform.
- Platform competition shifts from feature checklists to developer-economics governance — who controls payments, review timelines, and OS updates becomes the durable differentiator, a gap neither vendor fully owns.
The trend: Developer mindshare is consolidating around an iOS-first, Android-second economics model, forcing Google to compete on monetization infrastructure rather than raw market share.