Angry Birds Developers “Paid content just doesn’t work on Android.”
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Angry Birds is the icon of mobile gaming at the moment, with a level of success other developers just dream of.
Their opinions on the mobile landscape is therefore taken pretty seriously. In an interview with Techmarketing.com their head honcho Peter Verterbacka spoke about the creation and progress of the app.
His views on the best mobile platforms for developers were quite interesting, but in the main served to confirm what we already knew – the iPhone and iOS is the present profit centre, and the up and coming Android OS were not particularly friendly to developers.
He said:
“Apple will be the number one platform for a long time from a developer perspective, they have gotten so many things right. And they know what they are doing and they call the shots. Android is growing, but it’s also growing complexity at the same time. Device fragmentation not the issue, but rather the fragmentation of the ecosystem. So many different shops, so many different models. The carriers messing with the experience again. Open but not really open, a very Google centric ecosystem. And paid content just doesn’t work on Android.
“Free is the way to go with Android. Nobody has been successful selling content on Android. We will offer a way to remove the ads by paying for the app, but we don’t expect that to be a huge revenue stream.â€
“Fragmentation on the device side is not a huge problem, but Steve is absolutely right when he says that there are more challenges for developers when working with Android.â€
Of course the company did not think the upstart Windows Phone 7 was particularly commercially viable at the moment, saying “Everything else is more or less “interesting†right now, ie no real business to be had, at least not yet.â€
On webOS he was pretty dismissive, saying “HP-Palm webOS is a really cool OS and has been a pleasure developing for that one, but the volume is irrelevant for the time being.“
He had one message to developers however looking for success:
“1. Create a great app
2. Get the message outâ€
With growing app stores of course step 2 gets increasingly important, something we are happy to help developers with.
Read the full interview at TechMarketing.com here.
