Closed for business - Android vs. iOS

[quote=“Cero,post:1,topic:39417”]
Really? Because my job is to sell people stuff, and more than half pay with credit card. I guess I live in an odd part of europe.

Credit cards are, despite anecdotal evidence offered here, extremely common in Europe. That doesn’t really matter though - even I don’t use a credit card to buy stuff online, I use a debit card instead usually, as I don’t have any credit cards myself any more (I don’t actually need any credit). Nearly everybody who has a bank account has a debit card - either Visa Debit or Maestro. And this is the card that everybody can use with Google Wallet or Paypal or Amazon Paymebts or most other online transaction providers.

So this fact notwithstanding - that being, there is virtually no excuse nor even technical reason why Europeans do not buy things online but instead find it mysteriously easier to pirate them - you would need to explain the success of iTunes and Steam in Europe to me, because I’m dying to know how they’re so successful if nobody in Europe can pay.

Cas :slight_smile:

In Europe, creditcards are extremely common among >30 year olds.

When I was 24, none of my friends and colleges had a credit card. This is anecdotal evidence, sure, but it’s my observation and I’m fairly sure it give a good impression of the situation in my country (The Netherlands).

Credicards are only slowly becoming more common because the internet basically requires you to have one - still, my guestimate is that it’s increasing very slowly.

But… but… but… you don’t need a credit card. A debit card will do. Anyone can have a debit card who has a bank account. They normally give you them automatically.

Cas :slight_smile:

Just commenting on this specific quote:

Age is very important in sales. I can imagine the majority of game purchases would be for people younger than 30, as they typically have money to spare and don’t yet have this burden of a mortgage and a family to provide for.

Most sites ask for credit cards, so while they may support debit cards, that’s not a widely known fact. (or at least, I thought ‘only’ Paypal was a major player in that area)

Nice inflammatory article that sounds quite a bit butthurt.

I can agree to a degree that, for most users, freedom is not as important as convenience. But what the article fails to realize is that the freedom offered by open platforms is meant for the developers.

My personal distaste for iOS is not because of the user experience. At the end of the day both the Android and Apple markets (Or the BlackBerry market in my case) are functionally identical from a user perspective, but for a developer, having the owner of the system have absolute control over distribution is a very dangerous proposition.

The idea of a free market is that products are evaluated by consumers, and survive on their quality alone. In closed markets like iOS or the consoles, the platform owners can force their own agenda, effectively banning whatever they don’t deem suitable of being published, to the detriment of consumers and developers alike.

Some time back, someone made a iPhone app that showed a pair of bouncing breasts (not even bare, mind you) that would jiggle to the movement of the device. The app was quickly banned.
Yeah, it was juvenile, and maybe not in the best of tastes, but if I as a consumer decide I want a pair of jiggling breasts on my iPhone, or a jiggling dick for that matter, who the hell is Apple to tell me what I can or cannot do with my device?

And let’s not forget that this isn’t new. The videogame market has been heavily influenced by Wal-Mart in the US, a retail chain so big, that their refusal to stock adult-oriented or otherwise objectionably titles has resulted in the near total destruction of said market worldwide.

The bottom line: How can new markets and niches be explored, if neither the consumers nor the developers are truly free to choose the products they want to focus on?

Oh, and a nice extra that is constantly being experienced by console developers? Closed markets, and exclusivity to said markets means that, should the market fail, anyone tied to it fails too.

@Riven:

[quote]Age is very important in sales.
[/quote]
Yeah, and Credit Cards should be the tool for parents to control the spending habits of their children. That’s why many mobile devices try to find ways around it (charging purchases to the phone line, for example), so kids can buy. Luckily, Apple and others are beginning to take heat from concerned parents who (rightly) see it as immoral to extort children for money.

So yeah, credit cards are an obstacle, but a needed obstacle in my opinion.

Don’t underestimate the 18-30 group, which is where all the money is at (and no easy way to spend it :()

Agreed, but said group is maturing too, we’re all getting used to online purchases, and tricks that used to work no longer work that easily. Guess that’s why kiddie games are trying to extort money from chidren now… And cats.

Also, let’s not forget that everything, including iOS devices, the Xbox, the PS or the Wii can be pirated, and there’s even people making money out of offering convenient jailbreaking services. Closed platforms aren’t really a guarantee in the long run.

It can’t go without mentioning that the marginal cost of software development is ZERO, meaning it might cost you N dollars/euros/quatloos to build your first widget (the app), after which it costs nothing to copy it and serve the next one. At one time, you might have had to pay for distribution, but now you don’t even have to do that for most stuff.

So here we have an industry with an infinite supply, heavy demand, a minimal barrier to entry, and zero marginal cost. I simply can’t envision any circumstance in which prices aren’t going to spiral down. Apple’s walled garden does curate an experience that many devs and users are willing to pay for, but it will always have to find something to differentiate it from what you’ll get for free. First shoe to drop, I suspect, will be the demise of the App Store fees charged to devs.

Ahh, this brings the following list to mind:

5 Reasons the Future Will be Ruled by B.S.

Fun read, and insightful.

It’s much more nuanced than that. The cost of actually selling digital goods is not zero. It can, sometimes, cost more than you make.

Cas :slight_smile:

I love David Wong’s article, but there’s always going to be goods that are not digital. People will still take the money saved on digital crap, and buy physical crap. Nonetheless, bullshit does seem to be quite the growth industry.

That is false. I made ample sure when I created a new account with a different bank to register for Google Wallet these last days.
You can not use a standard (in this case german) EC card with Maestro logo on any checkout that specifically requires a credit card. Also these cards dont even have a card number like credit cards (those are just for identification and are shorter too), they only have your bank account number on it, which also has a different length (which is also different from bank to bank).

I heard of people in german online communities who got credit cards just for PSN… It’s obvious that our ATM cards dont work.

I second this. At least with a german EC card, this isn’t possible. My solution to this problem was to marry a woman who owns a credit card… :wink:

Ok, I agree that there are problems with the Debit/Credit systems, I’ve had issues trying to buy plane tickets from U.S. airlines because of that.

But let’s not kid ourselves, the spending market is evolving, and payment methods will evolve with them. At best this is a temporary nuisance.

@sproingie:
I agree. I think that even though the digital market will keep growing tremendously, physical purchases will never truly go away, since for all the patches and firmware upgrades in the world, we still can’t get rid of those hoarding instincts we’ve had since before leopard loincloths.

Also, don’t many games (Like Angry Birds, for example) make sickening amounts of money through merchandise?

On the long run, if you get a hit, it might be better to diversify and milk that brand recognition for all it’s worth. After all, if you don’t, someone else will step up and do it, royalty-free. >:(

I believe they bring in two sheep or an interesting piece of moss they found. :stuck_out_tongue: Notes like “please can I have this stuff”? :stuck_out_tongue:

Indeed.

But trying to keep us on track, the core problem is that it is easy to pirate apps on Android. So build apps that are hard to pirate (networked).

Well, exactly. It’s actually nothing to do with credit cards whatsoever, or iTunes, Steam and Amazon would also fail. It’s because piracy is trivial. I full agree with the sentiment and the tone of the article’s rant. Much of this is down to bearded nerds* demanding configurability which the great unwashed does not give a flying feck about. You’ve only got to look at iOS to see the truth of the matter.

Cas :slight_smile:

  • disclosure: I am a bearded nerd

What bugs me most about piracy is not really the “stealing” of content…it’s all of piss-poor self justification/entitlement excuses for doing so. If I doing anything that’s illegal…I don’t make excuses for doing so.

Indeed. Don’t forget though that the majority of people whining and self-justifying on the internet are actually a tiny minority of actual people.

Cas :slight_smile:

Also keep in mind that the effects of piracy aren’t really that clear-cut.

Publishers like to use it as a scapegoat, but there still is no definite proof that pirated games equate to actual lost sales, and some indicators point that those sales wouldn’t have been made at all if the game had been unpirateable.

Whatever the actual truth, the point is that we exist in the current market, and while it evolves around us, we need to adapt to it. Complaining about self-entitled dipships won’t do much for the success of our projects.

Then again, mocking them is very satisfying, that’s why I totally endorse copy-protection features that troll pirates.