Information wants to be monetized: why iPhone developers will always make more money than Android developers

Bloomberg has an article today that seeks to understand when, exactly, developers of Android apps will start to make equivalent dollars as iPhone developers.

This will never happen.

At least, not while Steve Jobs heads Apple. And, no, it is most definitely not out of a concern for developers. Rather, Jobs and Apple value, appreciate -- and seek to get a cut of -- premium content. Premium content is that which we pay for, willingly. Popular music, popular books, the best (remaining) newspapers, television shows, movies, games. Apple does not prevent free content to cross their path. The iPhone, for example, offers tens of thousands of free apps, a solid YouTube app, free university lectures, podcasts and more.

However, their entire iOS ecosystem, of which the iPhone is but one pillar, is optimized for the discovery and sharing and purchasing and downloading and consuming and creating of premium content. This is why iPhone could lose the smartphone wars while Apple will be the new millennium's robber barons of media and programming. Yes, laughing all the way to the bank.

From Bloomberg:

Pinger and other programmers don’t want to miss out on the $40 billion that Booz & Co. estimates will come from sales of apps by 2014, much of it from Google Inc.’s Android platform. Android unseated Research In Motion Ltd.’s software as the top mobile operating system in the U.S. last quarter. That’s making developers more willing to put up with its drawbacks, including higher app-creation costs and an online marketplace some users consider harder to navigate than Apple’s App Store.

“Even though we are not making any money on Android right now, we have pretty high hopes for it,” said Andrew Stein, PopCap’s director of mobile business development. “There’s really no reason why users shouldn’t consume and buy content to the same extent on an Android phone as they are on an iPhone.”

Wrong!

Apple has already sold over 100 million iOS devices (iPods, iPads, iPhones). They have over 160 million iTunes accounts. App developers for Android can complain that the Android Marketplace is needlessly difficult to navigate. They can urge Google to open up the marketplace in more countries. This will help but will in no way offer Android developers the same potential for riches as iPhone.

My parents have a iTunes account. So do my children. None of them are aware of Google Checkout. My family, my friends, my associates have all purchased a variety of content from iTunes: games, videos, songs. They do this again and again. Sometime on impulse, sometime on the recommendation of friends, sometimes on the recommendation of a program (e.g. Pandora). There are numerous reasons, from wanting to kill their cable television bill to reading a book on an airplane on their iPad.

But unlike the Android, the Blackberry, likely the Windows Phone, Apple has shifted the notion of what a smartphone is, and it is not merely a mobile phone with advanced features like web browsing. It is, inherently, a platform for the distribution and consumption and viewing and listening and reading and playing, alone or together, of a variety of media and content.

This hasn't even occurred to Android/Google. Nor Blackberry. Nor Nokia, even. Microsoft understands this. However, they are financially and emotionally locked in to dying platforms, like Exchange and Office and Windows and Zune and Xbox and can't make the leap to turning these all on their head so as to ensure they are optimized for the customer, rather than for Microsoft. Apple has succeeded at this.

It is natural for every single iPhone (and iOS) user to sign-up for an iTunes account. It is second nature, even to grade-school children, to buy a song or rent a video or pay for a game app. Every single iOS user accepts and believes in the notion of paying for quality goods and services. True, you may think TV show X or Pop Song Y are garbage, that is a matter of opinion. But every iPhone user has access to the same media as you, likely far more, and has been taught that paying for this content, this information, is a appropriate exchange. Everyone wins. Apple makes the entire process, from discovery to consumption as easy as possible, does absolutely nothing -- nothing -- to make you think you should seek out a lower-cost or free alternative, and now lets you share and celebrate your purchases with the newest version of iTunes.

Of course I will pay for your app. I want your app. It provides value to me. And it is so easy for me to pay for it, download it, use it, wherever I go, whenever I want.

Do you think of Android when you read that? Blackberry? Naturally, iPhone users are more lucrative to developers than Android. If you can make a living, an actual living, off of in-app advertising, and you're not a big brand, then Android should work quite well for you. If your goal is to make money off the sales of your app, you simply cannot beat iPhone. Remember, the entire mega-corp strategy behind Google is to give everything away for free so as to make it up on advertising. This peremeates everything they do, for good or bad. Apple is exactly the opposite: we offer something of quality and value and expect you to pay for it and have made this as simple as possible for all parties. This is why a billion dollars have been paid out to iPhone app developers -- in less than three years.

More from Bloomberg:

Apple iTunes users can do one-click shopping because iTunes saves their information. While Android buyers can do the same if they sign up for Google Checkout, that service doesn’t have as many users. Android Market also lacks features for in-app purchases, which some developers of Apple apps use to sell new game levels or virtual products.

App creators have to contend with various versions of Android and differences in screen resolution and keyboard. That makes it more expensive to test programs and can force developers to design for the lowest common denominator, said Bill Predmore, president of POP, which builds mobile applications and ads for clients including Google, Microsoft Corp. and Target Corp. Still, the accelerating rate of Android phone sales is luring some developers that keep long-term prospects in mind.

Correct. There will be more Android phones. Google can do more to ease the discovery and payment and download process. But it will *never* be the equal of Apple on this. Because all of this is core to Apple and not to Android/Google. And again, part of the reason it is not core to Google is because Google itself does not believe in this model. They are optimized for scanning every scrap of information on the Internet, presenting it to you, wrapped around various advertisements. This highly lucrative model, for them, can make some wealthy but, in the aggregate, drives the cost of information -- of content, books, videos -- to zero. Apple does all it can to ensure content, quality content as defined, always always always has a real inherent value attached to it.

When was the last time you paid for any Google service? Yet I should pay for your app?

With the millions and millions of Android phones to be activated each year, developers absolutely can make money off the Android platform. However, it will be through leveraging the power of 'free' and scale that Google offers. Any developer that believes they can use the Apple iPhone model, transplant it for their app on Android, however, will lose.