Surely selling more apps on different platforms has something to do with marketing?
Well, that's not what we were debating, you had said that their marketing is what attracted developers to the device to produce great apps and that's what I was disagreeing with. It's the service, tools and results that attract developers.
As for marketing, I will not deny that attracts the customers to buy the apps and buy the devices. But what is being said above and what I am disagreeing with is that it's SOLEY marketing which does this. There are people who claim, as has been done in this thread, that it's purely marketing that has made apple successful, nothing else. That's what my post above was all about. I'm not saying they don't do any good marketing, I'm saying that good marketing can only get you so far.
For a developer android is just a joke, for the reasons described in my previous post but there are other complexities which make it less successful too.
1. Devices.
When you build something for an ipad you have one aspect ratio to deal with, no matter what ipad version someone has the aspect ratio is the same, that was the same with the iPhone until the 5, but that's for another day. When you build for android you have a pool of hundreds of different devices that the app is going to be loaded on, this is especially difficult with phones as there are all manner of screen sizes. Optimising your app for every android device is a challenge.
2. Single sign on
For years apple has been selling music to its customers, which means one thing. Credit card on file. When these customers buy an ipad of iPhone or iPod touch the majority already have an account with apple and are purchasing apps in seconds. Android users just don't buy as many apps as apple users for a variety of respasons, but one of them is that the path to purchase is longer.
For a huge majority, even if they never bought music before, they likely bought their I device from the online apple store, thus creating their apple id when they made that purchase. You buy your android device from all manner of different traders so it's impossible for google to grab your details to serve it up to you, then there are different stores to buy the apps from, nook store, blackberry world, amazon, google play etc. it's a minefield for the customer.
3. technical stuff
Each individual App Store for android has their own way of approving stuff, for example. Nook doesn't like your apps running in the background, they want you to close them down when you exit, but they want it to resume where it left off. On apple this is taken care of for you at the os level, in android on nook you have to implement this yourself, but you don't have to on all the versions of android, nook and people like nabi or learn pad etc tweak the is for their own device.
4. Multitouch
All ipad versions from day one have 11 touch points. iPhones have 5. The majority of android devices have 2, then there are a couple which have more, but it means that you can never build an app which has more than 2 touch points for an android device, since you can never tell which device it might be used on. You'd have to restrict it on the store to the tiny proportion of devices, which you won't do because sales would be dismal. In iOS it's the same across all the devices of a particular type, I.e. iPads or iPhones/iPods.
All of the above and more is what attracts developers to iOS more than android. Android just do not measure up for the app developer for the most part, there is no money to be made so largely they walk away. It's not marketing, it's tools, services and technical stuff.
