On Feb 27, 2:22 pm, Al Sutton <a...@funkyandroid.com> wrote:
> I see things at the moment as being similar to the Unix/Linux market
> place. I know many good Unix sysadmins who would rather spend hours or
> days seaching out a piece of free software (or writing it themselves) as
> opposed to paying even $20 for a commercial offering, and Android seems
> to be in the same boat.
I don't think that's the case really. What drives good Unix sysadmins
and the FOSS crowd in general is to learn something on the way. They
(strike this, we, I guess) like the challenge and the sense of
accomplishment when it's done. It's not like we wouldn't spend $20.
As far as the Android Market and its customer base is concerned -
trying out 12 (you pick the number) different Twitter clients,
flashlights or tip calculators does not fall into this category. And
in fact the Linux types, those that spend the effort to build it
themselves, is not the target group. It's the regular person that uses
the handset to do stuff, be entertained or informed. Given the target
does not seem to have a problem with being charged an extra $10 a
month to get from 400 to unlimited messages, it's disappointing to not
see this spending attitude transpire to the market. A survey on the
number of downloads that paid apps have scored after this week or so,
would reveal an ugly picture. It's not like there isn't opportunity,
but it shows it's hard to be relevant, and on top, the app needs to be
well executed.
At this point (games aside), success seems to gravitate towards apps
that interact with a back end, such as weather forecasting,
identifying songs or streaming a video clip. Even there, the question
is whether an app is really a gain, or whether the original web app
isn't more useful in the first place. I believe I left this as a
comment once.
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