[twotwotwo]

You really want a survey of some folks who have released similar apps on multiple platforms, and to cover the development-cost and revenue sides, including in-app purchase and any ad revenue, if that's a substantial source for anyone.

Just comparing aggregates, it's hard to tell what differences are thanks to the platform and what's simply because "the average app" on Android is different from "the average app" on iOS (because of review, barriers to entry, etc.). And there's nothing about costs.

Much as I like Android, I bet iOS tends to be the better deal for paid-app developers right now. You have fewer devices to target and no equivalent of Android's Gingerbread situation. ("The Gingerbread Situation" is also a new punk band I'm forming, BTW.) And Apple customers seem to skew a little spendier, though maybe that's changing.

[sirkneeland]

I think the average Apple user will continue to skew spendier, but the sheer number of Androids will mean that there is a portion of Android users who will spend as an iOS user would. And when the overall number of Androids is high enough, it could be so that even is 25% of Android customers were valuable against 75% of Apple's customers, Android being 5x the size means there are just as many (or more) "valuable" Android users than iPhone users.

[miahi]

I'm not sure about that. I spent >$1500 on Android phones, but less than $10 on apps. There are a lot of free/ad app equivalents for the paid apps - I did not need to buy anything. The only paid app I am regularly using is JuiceSSH for the port forwarding feature.

[SG-]

There are so many more 'Apple users' using iPhones than actual Apple users (OSX) these days and they're buying apps.

The big reason is Android has marketshare but some Android users don't buy Android because of Android, they buy it because it was a free phone or because it was the only thing they could get it.

You can't look at phone marketshare when simply determining potential app market.

[twotwotwo]

Sure, quite possible over time; only talking about now. There'll probably be some consolidation of the Android handset market, or at least rough spec convergence, and Gingerbread will certainly fade out.

(Spekaing of Gingerbread, I kind of wonder if Google should show some more charts at http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html -- show share as a percent of download volume as well as device count. Because I bet those old and very-low-end phones on 2.3 are less actively used than their sheer numbers suggest. That is, I bet devs are safer ignoring Gingerbread than it looks ike.)