The Humble Bundle project has been a huge success for the developers behind it that set it up and gave their apps for whatever price people were going to pay. The Humble Bundle site would show an average price that if you beat, you’d also get another game. What’s interesting is that Android users paid more ($7.43) than both Windows ($5.73) and Mac ($7.02) users, but less than Linux users ($9.92). I guess nobody can beat the Linux users in generosity.
Android users have long been considered cheapskates, but perhaps there’s a different truth to all of this. Perhaps the Android users want to pay for apps, but can’t or it’s too hard for them to do it. Apple has one big advantage in this, because everyone has to sign-up with their iTunes account, which they have since most people already had an iPod before that, and this means they already have a credit card linked to it.
This means that as soon as they log in, it’s very easy for Apple users to pay for something. With Android it’s not even close to being that easy. The huge problem is that not too many people have a Google Checkout account. This is Google’s fault, and I hope they regret it very much right now, because they had years to make it popular, and they didn’t. They really slacked off with Google Checkout ever since they introduced it, and now when they could’ve used it the most, not many people are using it.
So even if people wanted to buy apps, they don’t have a Google Checkout, and they’d rather avoid paid apps then, and push them to pirate them or get free apps instead. Then there’s the thing that the paid apps were made available very slowly for Android users in many countries, and then they got in-app purchases even slower than that.
So all of this is what led developers to believe that since they don’t buy too many paid apps, then users are just cheapskates. But this is pretty ridiculous, because even if every single Android “techie” who knows how to pirate apps would do it, by now Android is already used mostly by regular people, because of the sheer number of devices sold. These people would pay, just like iOS users, if only it would be easy for them to do so. I figure it’s going to take a while longer before Google gets to parity with Apple in this department.
[Source: Humble Bundle]