No Gold Rush For Android

It should be pretty obvious now that there won't be a so called gold rush for developer creating android apps. While I was out running this morning I was pondering why.

The original gold rush was where people quite literally rushed across a county to stake claim to some land in the hope of finding gold quite literally in the river beds. Basically you could find gold just lying around... I have no idea if this is factually true, I suspect a lot of hard work was involved. The gold was still on the surface because the local inhabitants did not value gold in the same way the Europeans did?

In computing there have been plenty of gold rushes. The two that spring to mind are the casual game gold rush. Game programmers suddenly realised lots of middle age women like to play games and pay money for them. Suddenly lots of casual game portal sites appeared and some developers got rich servicing this need. The ones that got in early had a pent up demand and did not not need a game with high production value to make a lot of money. Demand was just that high. The gold rush had started and the media reported some people striking it rich.

Trouble was as more competition appeared they competed by increasing production values. Make your game more shiny than the next. This ate into the profit margins. But times were still good. As more and more developers entered the market the portal sites started to treat developers as a comodity and reduce the spilt the developer got. They were able to do this because development teams where a commodity as each individual team could easily be replaced. The skill required to clone a match 3 game is not immense. Still the portals sites had a lot of customers and if you (a developer) got in the top ten then times would still be good.

Still more developers entered the market. Productions standards where about as high as they could get for these type of games. The next easy thing to do was to start to compete on price. Suddenly developers where only getting 30% of $6.99 instead of $19.95. Smaller portals could not compete with the big ones and started dropping like flies, concentrating more power in the bigger ones and giving developer less options to go elsewhere. 

The gold rush in casual games is well and truly over, in all honesty the gold rush was over after the first part. Once the media started to report the success of companies going from 0 to large sums of money it was probably too late to get in on the best times.

That is not to say their is not money to be made in the casual game market it, like a lot of things, is no longer easy.

The Iphone gold rush follows a similar story. There was a lot of pent up demand for apps. Remember apples did not allow app development on the phone for a while as they wanted you to do mobile web apps for the iphone. So by the time you could actually write and sell apps lots of Iphones were already in the market. So again huge demand but zero apps.

The early adopters got rich because there was nothing else to buy on the market. This got reported in the media. More developers moved in, production values of app increased if you want to be successful while at the same time there was a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.

Guess what? To be successful in the iphone market now takes hard work and it is certainly not a gold rush anymore.

So to return to why android is never going to have a gold rush. Well it should now be pretty obvious that a gold rush in the computing industry needs a demand that is not being satisfied. Android entered the mobile phone market when it was understood the app stores are expected and developers where there from the outset to meet the demand when phones were released. That means demand has never build up to the point where it is easy to get rich easily. Instead android developers are going to have to work on their products and make something good that people want to use in a competitive environment.

I don't see that as a bad thing. It means developers can more easily plan as the landscape that they deploy apps in is a little less bumpy.