Google as Darth Vader: Why iA Writer quit the Android app market
Google as Darth Vader: Why iA Writer quit the Android app market
After 7 years of increasing piracy, review spam, and shifting requirements, a notable productivity app calls it quits on Android.
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/16408366
Guessing they don't pray. Star Wars reference aside, learning about rampant Android piracy really made be rethink the pay devs receive for their effort. Per Business of Apps:
- Consumers spent $47 billion on Google Play apps and games in 2023
- Over 113 billion apps and games were downloaded on Google Play last year
- 2.61 billion apps and games are available to download on Google Play
- The top grossing app on Google Play in 2023 was Google One, a cloud storage service Instagram was the most downloaded app on Google Play last year, with 521 million downloads
The rest of the report is paywalled, so the number I was curious about -- MAUs (ideally DAUs, but that's a lot of time in Calc) for paid apps with at most 10,000 downloads -- is probably out there, but it's a Beehaw post. That report was the only result on DDG's first page relevant to the query "google play store apps by downloads."
All this to say, Apple's 30% and, well, walled garden that covers piracy to a sufficient extent is starting to look like the better choice for my next phone. And I have been an ardent avoider of Apple products since college.
I buil(t) my rigs, with every component suited to my needs (or budget; YMMV -- winning an i7-8086K gave me a lot of breathing room on the GPU side), but my life on a 24VDC electrical system has convinced me that a laptop need to replace my rig, and Apple seems to have my needed "lots of power with incredible battery life" nailed. But I now have to pick a final product that I didn't build and thus have no idea how to troubleshoot a hardware problem.
Except, I'm a light gamer, building factories and such. Being on ARM doesn't work.
I don't want to be in the iPhone-x86 crowd. Most things are doable, but hardly seamless. But giving up Factorio is a bridge too far.
I'm no longer seduced by Google's lie that app makers are rolling in the dough when it's actually slave wages supporting freeloaders. Sure, this is only one example, but as the issue is with Google policy, it's likely representative. That's why I wanted to see the figures.
Part of me thinks this rant could have also worked in Politics. š¤£
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I've seen a bunch of developers complain that piracy is rampant on Android. As in this case, the ongoing cost of pirates outweighs the income from paying users.
It's shitty.
The only cost from piracy is opportunity cost.
Anyway, I didn't see anyone in your post that supports the idea that piracy is rampant.
The developer mentioned in the article complains about a:
worsening struggle with red tape, [other stuff], and rampant piracy
The article goes on to describe some of the costs of piracy to the developer:
Piracy doesn't just mean lost revenue, Reichenstein wrote, but also increased demands for support, feature requests, and chances for bad ratings from people who never pay. And it builds over time. "You sell less apps through the [Play Store], but pirated users keep coming in because pirate sites don't have such reviews. Reviews don't matter much if the app is free."
Bad reviews for pirated apps sounds like a stupid excuse.
Last I knew you couldn't leave a review unless you visited the play store app page from the active Google account you installed and bought the app from.