Are All iPhone Games Available on Android?

[Chocu1a]

Part of the problem is the difference in Android phones. Some are low end & that inhibits development. All iPhones are built the same(pretty much) & that allows any ios user to play almost any game.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Part of the problem is the difference in Android phones. Some are low end & that inhibits development. All iPhones are built the same(pretty much) & that allows any ios user to play almost any game.

There is a massive difference in performance between the iPhone 3GS and the 4s so that argument is no longer valid.

The number of games on Android has increased tremendously in the last year and now the vast majority of top iOS games are on both platforms. Anyone who thinks this trend won't continue and that Android will never catch up with iOS isn't basing their opinion on reality.

 

[pm]

There is a massive difference in performance between the iPhone 3GS and the 4s so that argument is no longer valid.

The number of games on Android has increased tremendously in the last year and now the vast majority of top iOS games are on both platforms. Anyone who thinks this trend won't continue and that Android will never catch up with iOS isn't basing their opinion on reality.

I don't think I'd state it in such black-and-white terms, but yeah, I agree with you. There are still several games that I have on my iPhone that I don't see on Android, but that number decreases all the time. We have the perpetual debate about marketshare and money and revenue favoring iOS and I usually don't get involved, but I have an opinion and that is that Android will continue to pull ahead in terms of device marketshare and developer efforts will flow - eventually - to the platform with more users. While iOS app revenue is impressive currently, I don't agree idea that things as they are now dictate how they will be in the future.

 

[QueBert]

There is a massive difference in performance between the iPhone 3GS and the 4s so that argument is no longer valid.

The number of games on Android has increased tremendously in the last year and now the vast majority of top iOS games are on both platforms. Anyone who thinks this trend won't continue and that Android will never catch up with iOS isn't basing their opinion on reality.

The 2 biggest mobile games aren't on Android and neither developer have any plans to start up Android development. Also most of the popular games are on iOS for a good 6 months to a year before they touch Android. This won't change, Yeah Android will get the games, after they've been played to death by iPhone dudes. I wouldn't say Android getting Angry Birds, Cut The Rope. Doodle Jump & similar popular games a year after iOS is really catching up, but hay that's just me. How can Google overcome the 90/10 money market share split As it stands they're killing Apple in number of devices out there, yet they generate only 10% of the money apps are making. 90/10 is damn near Windows/OSX percentages. If they sold a billion phones in 2012 that 10% wouldn't even get to 25%.

 

[zerocool84]

A lot of you guys are forgetting that iOS has been #1 until only this year. Android had such a quick sudden rise. It takes time for the pendulum to swing but it's eventually going the other way. It can't happen over night but it certainly won't take 5 yrs. It's already started and it'll only continue. Obviously some people here think it'll never happen but it's already starting.

 

[poofyhairguy]

as a developer myself, I don't really see a lot of incentive to put my app on Android instead of iOS.

Competition.

Sure iOS for now and the foreseeable future will bring in the most app revenue, but what matters is not the total but the per-developer revenue.

Currently iOS developers make the most money, but as the market becomes saturated it will be harder and harder to stand out among the crowd and claim your share of the finite dollars going towards apps.

Since Android has less app competition, eventually its non-saturated market will look better and better to developers. Especially if iOS grows oversees and developers from developing countries with a low cost of living are willing to undercut first-world developers.

Eventually in a saturated app market, developers won't be able to be so picky if they want to survive. They will need their apps on all platforms to pull in the same revenues they get today from just iOS.

We are living in an app bubble or an app gold rush if you will. In ten or even five years the market will stabilize to more reasonable levels and developers will learn to deal with the realities of the market of that time, just like real estate today or tech after the dot-com crash.

Basically now they have the luxury to avoid Android. That is temporary, like all market bubbles.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

A lot of you guys are forgetting that iOS has been #1 until only this year. Android had such a quick sudden rise. It takes time for the pendulum to swing but it's eventually going the other way. It can't happen over night but it certainly won't take 5 yrs. It's already started and it'll only continue. Obviously some people here think it'll never happen but it's already starting.

it didn't take much time after the release of iOS2 for apps to start flooding out. heck i'd take the Facebook iOS app in JULY 2008 over the Android one before they came out in Dec 2010 and said "ok whoops we'll start making the facebook app better for Android." But even after that the FB for Android has slipped so far and the iOS one has has the new layout for months already. Sigh. It's been FAR too long.

 

[Pliablemoose]

Thinking iOS will maintain it's edge on games and ignoring the graphs and trends is a dangerous assumption, I can easily see Android becoming the dominant gaming machine in the very near future.

By it's nature, Android is going to be fragmented, likely forever, but (please for the love of all that is holy, everyone notice the "but") as the upper end hardware platforms for Android mature, it'll be much more attractive to game developers.

I can easily see Google set a list of hardware recommendations for a phone to be considered a "gaming phone" and allow manufacturers to label the phones in that manner, giving developers a fairly stable platform to develop for, and making it easy for end users to identify phones that would be attractive for developers to work with.

Hell, I need to send an email to Andy Rubin and suggest that... "Android "G" Certified" (G for gaming)

At this moment, iOS is more attractive to developers, and much more lucrative, so if state of the art gaming today is your goal, and iPhone or iPad meets one's needs better than Android OS'd devices.

 

[TuxDave]

There is a massive difference in performance between the iPhone 3GS and the 4s so that argument is no longer valid.

The performance gap of 4s and 3gs is huge no doubt but for whatever reason, developers seem to have knobs to make the games run well on the 3gs. I haven't hit a 3D game that ran terribly on my 3GS even to this year. The reduced resolution of the screen + reduce textures probably helped a ton but even to this day, the 3gs doesn't feel dated. I did eventually upgrade to get a front facing camera for Facetime but I'm sending my phone to my sister to play games on and I'm pretty sure she'll still have no issues.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Actually the 3GS is not what is dragging down the iOS gaming-wise.

That distinction belongs to the iPhone 4, with the same GPU as the 3GS but twice as high of resolution.

 

[runawayprisoner]

Competition.

Sure iOS for now and the foreseeable future will bring in the most app revenue, but what matters is not the total but the per-developer revenue.

Currently iOS developers make the most money, but as the market becomes saturated it will be harder and harder to stand out among the crowd and claim your share of the finite dollars going towards apps.

Since Android has less app competition, eventually its non-saturated market will look better and better to developers. Especially if iOS grows oversees and developers from developing countries with a low cost of living are willing to undercut first-world developers.

Eventually in a saturated app market, developers won't be able to be so picky if they want to survive. They will need their apps on all platforms to pull in the same revenues they get today from just iOS.

We are living in an app bubble or an app gold rush if you will. In ten or even five years the market will stabilize to more reasonable levels and developers will learn to deal with the realities of the market of that time, just like real estate today or tech after the dot-com crash.

Basically now they have the luxury to avoid Android. That is temporary, like all market bubbles.

I think you are looking at the App Store as it was... two years ago.

It's grown to be the opposite of what you are describing. New apps and small-time developers get the equal amount of exposure as big league ones. Obviously not through the Top Apps lists, but through the "search" function in the App Store. For instance, if I were to search for "racing" right now on the App Store, it wouldn't bring me the best grossing racing games, or the best rated racing games as the top results. It would bring me a list of anything related to "racing" and down the list somewhere would be Real Racing and Need For Speed, which are arguably the top grossing games now.

My point is... all apps that are released at the same time receive the same amount of exposure. In fact, if you are a game developer, you can join a community like TouchArcade and declare your app's release date for everyone in that community to try out. It's free exposure for now.

Will this change in a few years? Perhaps. But if Apple keeps the search function the way it is right now, I don't doubt that my next great app can come after 10,000 other apps like it and still stand out.

If competition was so stiff with iOS, you'd think Indie developers would have stopped jumping in a while ago. But no, Apple still attracts more developers day after day. And that's something.

In a few years, would it be different? Yeah. But I don't think anyone can say for sure that by then the App Store hasn't grown into something that no one could ever match in terms of scale.

To me, looking at the App Store now is like looking at Windows when it was in 3.1. Eventually, it'll be 90% of the market, or more. And I know for sure that none of us can really say that Mac OSX or Linux will overtake Windows in the next few years, or decade.

Some things just grow really large a few years. I'm not saying that there is no chance of Android catching up, but with the current momentum, App Store would have left Android Marketplace far behind. And it's not because App Store is growing fast. It's just because Android Market is growing slowly.

 

[Larries]

There is a massive difference in performance between the iPhone 3GS and the 4s so that argument is no longer valid.

The number of games on Android has increased tremendously in the last year and now the vast majority of top iOS games are on both platforms. Anyone who thinks this trend won't continue and that Android will never catch up with iOS isn't basing their opinion on reality.

Actually this argument is still valid.

Not many people will expect a 2 year+ old phone to have great performance as a brand new phone.

But you can buy the latest Andriod phone, and even on the SAME price range, you can have vastly different performance.

The GPU of the Galaxy S2 is nearly twice the performance of a Galaxy Nexus, which is in same price range and released nearly 5 months later. And when you extend to phones HTC, Motorola and LG....

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Actually this argument is still valid.

Not many people will expect a 2 year+ old phone to have great performance as a brand new phone.

But you can buy the latest Andriod phone, and even on the SAME price range, you can have vastly different performance.

The GPU of the Galaxy S2 is nearly twice the performance of a Galaxy Nexus, which is in same price range and released nearly 5 months later. And when you extend to phones HTC, Motorola and LG....

The iPhone 3GS and 4 are both sold as new and as mentioned earlier the 4 in particular is very underpowered considering it's resolution.

 

[Larries]

The iPhone 3GS and 4 are both sold as new and as mentioned earlier the 4 in particular is very underpowered considering it's resolution.

The 3GS is released 2 years ago. The 4 is released 1 year ago. They are also both priced under the 4S (edit: once the 4S is released - only 8G is available and priced under 4S 16G). Sane people will understand there is performance difference - even though they are still being sold by Apple.

The situation is not so clear in Andriod. The S2, released 5 months ago, will have better GPU performance than the Nexus, a brand new flagship level phone that is being released just now (and priced higher than S2 at least locally!). And they are both released by the same company.

 

[mosco]

This is one of the reasons I will soon be buying my sister-in-law's iPhone 4, after I dropped my iphone 4 in a lake, and have been using captivate for a while now.

Some of the major games are there on the android market, no where near the quality of the ios app store. The free games are a lot worse too.

 

[MrX8503]

As of right now, iOS has a better selection of games. To answer the original question, not all iPhone games are on Android.

Don't follow you. Most Android phones released today have hardware that's more than capable of running any version of iOS. iOS is proprietary Apple software though, so you'll never see it outside an Apple product.

I don't think he's talking about hardware, he's talking about how the two OSs aren't interchangeable.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Actually the 3GS is not what is dragging down the iOS gaming-wise.

That distinction belongs to the iPhone 4, with the same GPU as the 3GS but twice as high of resolution.

Four times the resolution actually -- twice the horizontal and twice the vertical. 4x the pixels.

Part of the problem is the difference in Android phones. Some are low end & that inhibits development. All iPhones are built the same(pretty much) & that allows any ios user to play almost any game.

I think that's a red herring. The non-standard resolutions of Android phones could be argued to be more of an issue.

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Apple has the best game selection right now. Granted, they also had a year and a half head start into the smartphone business, and a better defined App store/ecosystem until recently.

For now, iOS definitely has the better game selection. If Android keeps a >50% marketshare, then even with a profit discrepancy between iOS and Android, I think developers will be compelled to at the very least go multiplatform. The mobile marketplace is changing rapidly. Two years ago the clear platforms to develop for would be iOS and Blackberry. Now, Apple has the biggest and best App ecosystem but <25% marketshare. Some people, by contract, don't buy apps at all. But that is changing quickly.