how does the market suck for devs? I thought it was better than apples app store and google was much more lenient for devs, is there something we don't know about the market?
The Android market definitely doesn't suck, but it does have a few major drawbacks:
1)
Rampant piracy. To date, almost 20% of the people playing the premium version of Dillo Hills are playing a pirated version. Other developers I've talked to report piracy rates as high as 80%.
2)
Huge level of fragmentation. When a game developer makes a game for iPhone, they know that it's just going to
work on every iPhone. They're all the same. They all have the exact same hardware, the same operating system, the same plugins. On Android, a game could work perfectly fine on one phone, but barely run at all on another phone.
3)
Very low signal-to-noise ratio. This one is a double-edged sword. Android has a
ton of spam apps, which means that you have to work your ass off to get your app noticed at all. Of course, this problem has a counterpart on the iOS market: while the signal-to-noise ratio is higher, that also means that your signal gets lost with all the other signals.
Ultimately, I think Android is a hell of a lot easier to develop for. The entry fee is lower, there is no tedious approval process, and the API is very simple. Once the game is actually programmed, though, there are some clear drawbacks to developing for Android. Hopefully, these will improve over time.
