If anyone would’ve said this up till mid 2010, when Android still had smaller market share than iOS, they would’ve been labeled day dreamers. I remember very well how tough it was for Android to grow in the early days, and nothing was a given. Even myself I thought Android can only “win” with one condition – if more than just one or two big manufacturers commit to it. Fortunately that happened and since then it has been a constant rise for Android in market share.
So Eric Schmidt’s quote from the Le Web conference, doesn’t sound as crazy as it used to. If anything it sounds inevitable and something we’ve already been expecting. Android has over 200 million users now, 10 billion total app downloads, and over 300,000 applications in the Market. But it’s already catching up in app downloads with 1 billion per month, just like iOS.
Eric Schmidt also says that in about 6 months from now, a lot of applications will start being Android first, and iOS second. There’s a reason for that. First, it’s because Android should have a larger user base than iOS by then, and second because the Android Market is still not as ultra-competitive as the iOS one, which means there’s a lot of room left to grow for developers, and it means that developers will be able to pay for their development a lot faster.
Eric Schmidt believes that Android 4.0 will excite developers to make high quality and polished applications, too, and considering Android has been united for the phone and tablet version, that means it will be a lot easier for them to developer both a phone and a tablet version of the same application, with only slight modifications to the design, which should look a bit more optimized for tablets.
But the main code should be largely the same, and even design wise, apps that are made for phones should look pretty good for tablets even if they mostly leave them the same, granted they use the “fragments”, which helps them split the application in multiple screens, and improve the experience for tablets even if the developers leave the app mainly untouched.
Next year it should be the year when Android tablets will start selling a lot more, in part thanks to PC-class chips like Tegra 3 or upcoming dual core 2 Ghz Cortex A15 chips from Samsung, and also because of Android 4.0, which seems a lot better than Honeycomb in terms of polish and maturity.