App Store vs Android Market

Via @counternotions,

A successful independent app developer examines the differences between the App Store and the Android Market.

Quick take: if you are a savvy developer and have a reasonably popular app, like his Battleheart, there is definitely money to be made from the Android Market -- beyond advertising -- even if the total amount is less and the headaches are more.

Quotes from his post:

• The best part about releasing on Android is that there's no approval process.  This means if I get reports of a bug or incompatibility, I can often fix it right away and push out an immediate update, rather than having to wait a week for a trivial bug fix to be approved.
• I've also been fairly surprised by the revenue potential of the Android platform.  While it's still a much smaller market than iOS, there's money to be made through paid apps. Daily revenue from Battleheart on Android is fairly close, within 80%, of it's iOS counterpart at the moment.  This statement needs a couple qualifications though...
  • Battleheart on Android is currently very high in the android charts (top 50 apps), whereas Battleheart for iOS is not even in the top 200 games anymore, and yet still outselling it.  It's clear the overall size of the iOS app market is still significantly larger.
  • Battleheart on iOS had a MUCH stronger first couple of months due to prominent featuring by Apple, and since that initial rush has had a steady decline in sales.  Battleheart on Android will likely see a similar decline as it spends more time on the market.  If you compare launch months, then the iOS version outpaced the android version by a factor of 20.
• I'd go as far as to say that a polished, high quality product is more likely to be embraced on Android than on iOS because the quality bar on the android market is so pathetically low.  
• I think the lack of competition makes quality apps really stand out, and generates a lot of enthusiasm from app-starved android users. 
• The technical side of supporting android isn't so bad, but it is a bit of a nuisance.  The main thing I had to concern myself with was simply making the game work properly at various screen sizes and aspect ratios.
• The most frustrating part about developing for android is actually just dealing with the deluge of support e-mail, most of which is related to download and installation problems which have nothing to do with the app itself, and everything to do with the android OS and market having innate technical problems.  
• Do some googling for "can't download apps from android market" or similar wording, and you'll see that this is a widespread chronic issue for all devices and all OS versions.  There are numerous possible causes, and there's nothing I can really do about it as a developer, since its essentially just a problem with the market itself. 
• This brings me to another major complaint I have - google checkout.  As an android app developer, you have to sign up as a vendor with google checkout, where all transactions take place.  This means that you alone are responsible for resolving any billing concerns.  We actually have a tiny handful of people getting refunds on our iOS games every day, but since all billing and possible refunds are handled by Apple, I don't have to deal with it.  On Android, I do, and I really wish I didn't.  I just want to make games, not listen to people whine about how their app won't install (due to user error 9 times out of 10) and they missed the 15 minute window to give themselves a refund, or didn't even know there was such a policy.