This article reckons iPhone is at the forefront of gaming for time to come: http://gizmodo.com/when-it-comes-to-gaming-the-iphone-will-always-stomp-t-1767701278 Incredibly annoying when you want to punish Apple for their procedures- that regardless they are the forefront of mobile gaming.
Between Android and IOS, I think they have their own strengths and weaknesses, whereas IOS is more profitable for developers so most games flock to IOS first. Being on both sides of the field, some games have free trials on Android, but not IOS. IOS has more games, but Android is more robust, such as button mappers you can use to add physical controls to any game, like Shadow Fight 2, which plays light years better with physical controls. I guarantee Lynx won't be as hard with physical controls, lol!
Both of them are great, but most developer that develop a paid game preferring IOS because it is safer from any pirate. In Android you could install any pirate app without needed to root their phone, but this is not happening in IOS where there is tough process to get fully control on your system and not majority of user can do it. That is why IOS is safer environment for the developer.
Plus with iOS there's only a small number of hardware/OS versions to develop for. With Android there are so many different types of devices running different version of Android it make building quality apps much more difficult.
Didn't want to comment here (would end up with like a 2-page post ), but crazychimp's comment is an invitation to whip out the graphs and statistics: Here's something from Google itself: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html This one is old (from 2010, didn't find a recent one right away), but the fundamentals behind it still apply: http://stephenslighthouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/android-smartphones.png For extra fun, here's my favorite one: ~4000 different Android devices on record, and that number is only going up. I saw the same one for 2016 with ~6000 if I remember right, but can't find it anymore. Android device fragmentation, understatement of the year
I'm not so sure about this argument about number of devices as I think android has maybe started standardising itself- whereby people flock to the Samsung s6,s7,s8 if they want an iphone rival. I maybe wrong though, I didn't buy topend android. One thing I have discovered. Radiangames is on android, but no longer on IOS! Not sure the reason of that.
good to hear, I will certainly buy again the Radiangames games when I switch to Android. Despite the fortune I gave to Apple, it is my last year with Apple because I can't stand anymore being trapped in a "safe" place without any control on my stuff. Since the day Jay Freeman said the jailbreak is dead I don't see what could make me stay on IOS. Apple went too far with the 32 bits holocaust.
I made a post I made in May 2014... Much of that is still holds true today. You can easily ignore a majority of those Android users since they weren't into games to begin with. A mobile development podcast mentioned that even though more people pay for stuff on iOS, there's still generally a culture of not paying for stuff. He's of the opinion that to have something sustainable, you need to have a subscription service, pay have some freemium model, or do premium pricing. Since devs couldn't charge for updates, we're not talking about tacking on a few more $'s to the price tag. Whatever you think you should charge, you need to up that by a factor of 5 (since iOS AppStore doesn't let devs charge for updates, and that was mostly a BS policy anyways). With the premium pricing, you won't find much of that in the gaming world. Enterprise and business software... clients will pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for those since it saves hundreds to thousands of man hours per year. There's so much free/cheap entertainment within the iOS App Store, and even more when you consider other forms of entertainment that it's too saturated. Last but not least, while Monument had a 95% piracy rate on Android, there was still a majority of piracy on iOS too, at 60%. monument-valley-apparently-has-a-95-piracy-rate-on-android-60-on-ios-285851 Despite that, they say fit to make a sequel, although TBF, it's only on iOS, with only mention from articles saying an Android release is "soon".
i just couldn't resist not to post, as it is something i have thought about a lot. My next phone will be android for sure. If after a couple of years Apple starts giving a ^&*% about gaming, i will gladly switch back to iphone. The only ups Apple has in my eyes are 1) extremely optimised devices, but with the monstrous power of androids the difference is a couple fps, i can live with that and 2) most great games come to ios first with some months delay for android, i can also live with that as i have a ton of games in backlog. and why am i changing? Tell you why. The 32-64 bit thing was the last straw. When i got into ios gaming some years ago, i was buying games left and right that i had played, or i would play sometime in the future or wanted just to have them in my library (Final Fantasies most expensive examples). And i was pretty pissed that with every ios update half the games break/ have some kind of problem and needed a fix from the developer, and now i have to choose between staying forever under ios 11 or lose what i paid for some years ago. Meanwhile, i will freely emulate my twice bought final fantasies in my android device, and buy the games that i want to actually play again there. I need a gaming phone, that makes gaming easier, not put the buyer through loops and hoops and software incompatibilities every couple of years. So until - and if even- Apple starts caring, which i bet they won't, my money will go to Android.
Always an interesting conversation so long as people stay objective. I'm no expert & genuinely have no idea of what the 'market share' of devices is right now. Though, in my small collective (friends & family) I find that most parents/grandparents have an Android device. That decision tends to have been driven by, even just, one younger member of the family who has an Android already that has made THEIR own mind up of which decice to support & proceed to sell that concept to elders. I find that people with Apple devices generally "say" that Apple devices are good without much of a push. That coupled with the cheaper prices of Android phones, decisions tend to be made nased on the influence & price point. Again, this is quite an isolated group of friends & family, but taking that isolated demographic, there's a smaller number who are gamers. Those are the people who have decided for themselves with -less- outside influence, more understanding of the OS behind the hardware & a deeper understanding of the overall implementation of the phone. Of course, my own isolated experience could be completely blown out of the water if a survey also revealed the age ranges of smart phone owners (I've not looked it up myself), by it's possible that a larger market share does not necessarily mean a larger slice of the downloaded games/apps. Sometimes maybe, but not always at least. Disclaimer: I'm on my way home from a couple of drinks, not too heavy, but this probably a right mess of a message
