Your lack of success using Android is on how you see the world from a fixed point of view. Without a proper business model. People are not interested in selling apps. They are interested in selling services where an app comes in the package.
Do you think they do an one sell of an app or the app is just part of the package of a revenue stream ecosystem? Easily done using Android, easily deployed, no fees to be paid to the operating system provider, you can say “just buy 10 devices for your team” and no one gets horrified with the prices, etc.
An existing Xojo developer, which adds a companion Android app to their product based in Xojo and he may reuse knowledge about Xojo coding. Like a little tool to talk to a Web App via REST API and displays some data and caches them in a local database on device for offline usage.
New people, that want to write some small iOS or Android apps and like to not learn Swift and Kotlin and thus search for an alternative, that can serve both.
Both cases can be combined with selling a service or product, but that may not be the main goal.
Completely true. iOS might have 20-25% market share worldwide, but represents 63% of global app revenue in 2021. Google Play store global revenue is increasing every year and the gap is slowly closing.
When I release my apps on Android, I don’t expect more than a 10% increase in sales, for the moment.
Everything ends at “Business model” and “localization”. For selling apps worldwide for English speakers wanting 70% of the sales price, iOS wins easily.
That said, the same won’t occur at places like the most of Africa and Latin America, most of the Asia (the parts where languages are written mostly in Cyrillic, Indian and Chinese based chars). Take for example Brazil where people speak Portuguese (beautiful language if properly used), the market-share for iOS is about 13% against 87% Android, and iOS users basically uses just Whatsapp, Instagram, and take pictures (young people adds TikTok too). This market is kind of marginal, you just include it for brand reasons, saying that you support it specially if your company is big or luxury related.
Again, that said, we have a mixed world and 2 solutions. No one is “better than other”, both depends on your targets, both can be profitable or not, where you live counts, who are your customers and where you intend to sell your products too. One represents like 70% of the globe and the other 30%. At the end, the business model and profitability are on you using the platforms, not on the platforms.
For one of my apps, Brazil is the second biggest market (10% of total revenue), for another app it is ranked 8th (3% of total revenue).
Some developers underestimate Brazil as an important iOS market.
That’s just because you’ve hit a jackpot. Brazil is a place no one must ignore. 13% of 214.000.000 people is “just” 27.8 million people. A fraction of that fraction liked what you did.
The tool you are mentioning uses a huge and complex in-house multi-platform graphics engine, now being replaced by a more complex, clever, faster one… in development by LOTS of engineers since at least 2017 (6+ years), and other group trying to make pixel perfect clones of those UIs mimicking the look and feel also not complete. Currently, it is in alpha state and WIP… using LOTs of engineers. So, the reality overcomes the desires. I can assure you that the people behind of the decisions on how Xojo works made decisions based on “what can we release ASAP using the money we have?” and the answer to “who has deeper pockets? Xojo or the Big Tech?” the answer is “Not Xojo”.
As you know, this is an off topic subject hurting the rules of this forum. Extending the subject should be done privately.
Absolutely! In our company, we write several Android business apps that never get to the store but are directly sold B2B. We and our customers have no intrest in the ‘store’ story. Prices for an app can easily go up to several thousands of dollars. And for an ‘on-demand’ Android app, way more. But, IMHO, I seriously doubt Xojo will be used for such projects because the clients do not want to use an exotic tool if they make such an investment.
From a software architect POV, I should say that a client USUALLY have a need, and the architects decides what they will use to solve it. Rarely they specify it must be done using tool X. Never heard things as “use anything but Y tool”. Devs get their money delivering the object of the contract. If you fail, you will need to restart your project using another tool and losing something, or money or time to accomplish the (compromised) goal. That said, people will observe the evolution of tools and levels of completeness and stability. Sales will scale from there, but “using the tool”? People will. As soon as some levels of accomplishments are reached. The scale of use may vary, but the use per se? They will use it as soon as it can be used for creation of satisfactory contents. For me, I need a full featured tool being able to design for all formats (smartphones and tablets at first and later TVs) so I’ll wait a bit for the evolution, because v1.0 is just for smartphones, and will some features missing.
Our experiences are different then. We do indeed discuss with the other (clients) architects the overall needs looking for a solution, and at some point we also dive deeper into what the existing toolchain is they are already using. If they use chain X then they have always been very reluctant to introduce tool Y in it, especially when tool Y is completely unknown to them (which in case of Xojo is practically everyone of them). In almost every project we do, all architects involved are well aware of the possible tools that could be used, their overall dev coverage to determine initial (and scalability of) team sizes and even the technical debt of each of the tools. We consider all of them essential to ensure that the clients product is stable, scalable and ready for future updates.
EDIT: this is Alain Bailleul answering, but it appears a co-worker was logged-in the forum on this PC at posting.
Architects are software designers, clients are “people/companies needing software” and most clients usually don’t know anything about software tooling / toolchains used to deliver what they desire.
You depicted a landscape of clients being/having software developers/teams and having high level of demands on what will be done including reaching the level of choosing the tooling to solve a problem. Well those were covered by the word
Probably your typical client is someone with something already in production and needing some intervention. For this case you are correct, specially when you have to pass sources to other teams. Xojo is not an usual tool for this kind of client, probably those will use something popular and not so RAD as Xojo, something using Kotlin, C#, Java, Go, Python, Ruby, Dart, Rust or C/C++
The good news for Xojo is that the vast majority of software consumers are not this kind of client, they are just a regular guy with a business needing just an installation package, documentation and support; and Xojo may serve devs to reach those goals.
I’ve been buying iPhones since the 3GS was available in Hong Kong. 2 years ago when my iPhone died, I was faced with two choices. Pay Apple again and get the same experience with unfixed issues that frustrate me on a daily basis or I could try Android.
I decided to buy a refurbished Asus ZenFone 6, so if I don’t like it, I wouldn’t lose that much money.
I was so impressed that last summer I pre-ordered the ZenFone 9, paying full price (I did get a rebate) and gave the ZenFone 6 to my friends daughter.
Since I bought that ZenFone 6, several of my local friends have now purchased Asus phones.
One really cool thing is wired headphones I can get 30 hours of noise cancelling playback and if the headphone battery runs out, I can charge 'em while continuing to listen to music, thanks to reverse charging on the phone (and a separate headphone jack and USB-C port).
I used to sling the mantra about how iPhones were better, but since I tried Android, I have no intention of going back, maybe a different CEO will breath some magic back in to Apple…
