Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

Great report by a company called Lookout on Android vs. Apple apps. The key finding is “If each market continues to grow at the same rate, the Android Market will have more apps than the Apple App Store by mid-2012.”

Who know exactly how the growth curve for each market will continue to grow, but the finding is pretty clear that Android is rapidly gaining on Apple.

Android also seems to have a larger number of developers who have built more than one and more one app, vs. Apple, where over 50% of developers have only submitted a single app. Not really sure what this means, but perhaps the Apple world has more hobbyist developers who put only one app out there, while Android developers are more likely to be companies pursuing an App strategy?

Apps per Developer: Android vs Apple

Apple announces recurring subscription billing

There is suddenly a lot of noise about how Apple is introducing billing options for subscriptions. Except that there isn’t a lot of noise coming from Apple about it, so I’m pretty darn confused. Apple’s press release talks about “a new subscription service available to all publishers of content-based apps on the App Store.”

OK, cool, but what about SaaS services like OfficeDrop? I don’t mind paying 30% to Apple when they bring us new customers, but what about when our existing customers, free or paid, download our Apple apps as they use our service?

And what does this mean:

Publishers who use Apple’s subscription service in their app can also leverage other methods for acquiring digital subscribers outside of the app. For example, publishers can sell digital subscriptions on their web sites, or can choose to provide free access to existing subscribers. Since Apple is not involved in these transactions, there is no revenue sharing or exchange of customer information with Apple. Publishers must provide their own authentication process inside the app for subscribers that have signed up outside of the app… In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

I’ve got so many questions, and wish Apple was providing a little more clarity here to developers like us who are spending a lot of time and money developing on their platform. Since our apps are designed to seamlessly interact with our web service, I don’t know if we’ll have to somehow rip out the online upgrade forms we’ve worked so hard to develop, I don’t know if our email campaigns that encourage upgrades will somehow have to be modified for Apple, of if they will even work, I don’t know if Apple will give us decent analytics so we can test upgrade options and layouts…

Come on Apple, throw your development ecosystem a bone here and help us understand what the heck is going on.