You're correct... at ~78% of the mobile market share the platform is definitely on its last legs. Better to focus development on the remaining 22%, esp with that 30% Apple market overhead.... ???

Android definitely has hurdles to overcome but it's far from "toast". I really can't conceive where that view would come from?

>at ~78% of the mobile market share

That's the most misleading & pointless statistic I've ever come across and definitely the most dangerous one if you're a developer. Why? Well, VAST MAJORITY of that marketshare are phones that are so cheaply made that they cannot run even 4.4 let alone 5. Only a tiny portion of these phones are actually capable of running latest apps & games well. So all these people running non-Android (China for example doesn't really run certified Android but various forks of AOSP) are not really your customers.

And don't even get me started on user base... if you read Google Play reviews, you'll notice that people give you 1 star ratings if you decide to charge for an app or decide to have IAPs in your "free" app. So good luck making a living off Android apps. About the only way you can do it, and the most common way for Android devs to make money these days, is to exfiltrate as much personal data as possible and sell it to data brokers. That's why all these "free" apps require so many permissions.

Anyway, I've been an Android dev for 4+ years and recently moved into server-side development but I pity the guys who still try to make a living off Android.

This is entirely true, and it's omitting the worst aspects of the situation relating to revenue and platform momentum.

As someone that has overseen tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of installs driven off the Play Store in my time it pains me to admit that economically speaking Android does not make sense at all today. My impression is many of the HN crowd are in denial about this. Two or three years ago things did look very different.

Reflexively I often like to blame poor stewardship for the situation, but in more sober moments I've come to think that the way Android is distributed and the OHA operated is structurally unsound. The surprising aspect of it is just how successful Apple have been at cultivating an audience composed of the vast proportion of valuable customers, and had they not had such success then the open source Android may have worked out better.

This pisses me off massively because Android makes all sorts of more technically interesting end user apps possible, but with a business hat on if it can't also be made to work on iOS it's not worth doing.

> As someone that has overseen tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of installs driven off the Play Store in my time it pains me to admit that economically speaking Android does not make sense at all today.

> My impression is many of the HN crowd are in denial about this

Oh, the irony here is great

I'm okay with apps becoming non-profitable commodities, at least for the general user. We have enough fremium games and other junk as-is. Apps should be added-value for another product (control my theromstat, get richer content from a website, etc). The vision of mobile as eating the world never made sense. It has its place and unsurprisingly, the gold rush is ending. You can only make so many Angry Bird clones and flashlight apps.

Apps will eventually be like the web. They won't be profit makers on their own. Its also good to see a lot of the goldrush crowd go away. The app store is just too gamified to the point that finding good stuff in near impossible unless you know the exact name of the app you want.

>I'm okay with apps becoming non-profitable commodities,

You're delusional if you think you will have free AND excellent apps at the same time. It's usually "pick one" situation.

To have great apps you need incentive for developers to make them (which is 99% of the time MONEY). Take the money out of the equation and you have mostly junk.

"I'm okay with apps becoming non-profitable commodities"

As a developer, I'm not.

"Better to focus development on the remaining 22%, esp with that 30% Apple market overhead.... ???"

You realize that Google has the exact same 30% overhead, right?

Yeah. A better objection for 51Cards to have made would have been something along the lines of "Especially with that infinitely recurring $100/year Apple Market membership fee." [0]. :)

[0] Note: I have not checked the price of Apple Market membership fee in quite a while. It might no longer be $100. I am fairly sure that the policy of deactivating your apps in the App Store[1] when you stop paying the fee remains.

[1] This is different from removing software from phones, mind.

I like the fact that it's open source, mostly excluding some third-party binary blobs, but on most phones I can install custom ROMs and kernels, and even fiddle with these binary blobs.

People who bought into Apple's closed garden (with a capitol c) need to rationalise their investment.

Part of that rationalisation is at will dismissing the value of open technology, despite 99% of the internet and 90% of the Apple ecosystem lives atop of it.

Considering how lots of full on FOSS Linux users were lured to the Apple platform for its (at the time) impressive desktop, this has probably caused one of the biggest damages to open source software we have seen in recent time.

Android is marching ever further away from open source with every release. They're boiling the frog and you didn't notice.

Good point. Too bad it remains the most viable open-source mobile OS around.

Looks like the Windows troll decided to show up. I'd be more worried about the sad state of Windows, its flagrant security issues and it's invasive privacy "features". No wonder the PC market is declining.