Mixed Reports: Android Market Sales

If you’ve kept an ear out for Android in the blogosphere recently, then you’ll have heard some contradictory information regarding the sale of applications in the Android Market. Some people are shouting out that the end is nigh, others say that life is trending towards better times, making it tough to know what’s really going on. Apparently it all depends on what market you’re looking at.

Take Handango for example, a third party application store for multiple mobile platforms. Offering over 140,000 mobile applications for just about every device you can imagine – they also have a wide range of Android packages. From a quick glance, it looks like a mix of above average quality, and overpriced trash all thrown in together. The point here is that they’ve been reporting that the Android platform is their number one mobile game selling platform.
Great news for the life of the OS, right? Well, great news for Handango at least – especially considering that these sales come from their very own “Market”.

An appropriate counterpoint would be mobile game developer Larva Labs who have recently let the world know that they’re incredibly bad at making money. No, that’s not quite what they said, it was more like “We only get like, $60 a day from our games on the Market” or something., whereas they earn a heck of a lot more from other platforms. One would love to say “Too bad for you, best make some better games, whiners.” (seriously, have you played Retro Defense? How much effort did they really put in there?) but complaining about the sheer usability of the Android Market seems to be the done thing at the moment – with good reason.

The Market in its current form is serviceable, but well, lacking in many respects. However, fear not gentle reader, it’s getting a major overhaul in the coming updates. Praise be to Google. There are screenshots out there, but more on that later.

As much as we would love to verbally abuse developers who are simply porting over their lame ideas from other platforms to Android, instead of designing for it from the ground up, the fact that they’re not making money doesn’t appear to be entirely their fault if a third party app market can do so much better.
How about a solution then? It seems to be on the way, so the answer people, is patience. Sweet, difficult patience. Oh, and make some better games. Seriously.