A couple of new snippets of info on the apps market released this week show that you’d be silly – nay stupid – just to concentrate all your efforts on building apps for the Apple platforms.
There was plenty of big news for Android developers released at this week’s Google I/O jamboree in San Francisco’s Moscone centre. First Google’s VP of engineering Vic Gundotra made a big revelation. Last year, Google was activating 30,000 Android phones a day. In February, that number jumped to 60,000. Today, Google is now activating over 100,000 Android phones a day.
But that’s not all. Gundotra also announced that there were now over 50,000 apps available for the platform. And there are some 180,000 developers working on the platform. There are also now over 60 compatible Android devices, from 21 OEMs in 48 countries, and on 59 carriers. That’s a big market. 30+ million devices is a real and credible market.
Elsewhere instant messaging aggregator service provider eBuddy, announced that its Mobile Messenger app has been
downloaded by over one million users in more than 203 countries and back in April Nokia announced that the OVI platform was seeing around 1.6 million downloads every day, it offers support for over 100 devices (more than 60 of them being powered by the Symbian operating system), and users can access content from publishers from more than 80 countries. With the Digital Chocolate app also has managing to reach over 4.5 million downloads on Ovi.
So the next person who suggests to us that there’s no market for apps built on other platforms, will get our office iPhone rammed down their throat sideways.