Apps, apps, and more apps! It takes more than just a fancy device sporting an incredible HD display, a great camera, and amazing processing capabilities to make a phone truly “smart”. Honestly, it’s all about the apps. An “app market” is a one-stop shop for getting games and other Internet applications such as Google+, Angry Birds, and more. It’s easy to say that without app markets, your smartphone might as well just be called a dumbphone. Here’s the rub: The Android Market (Google Play) entered the game after Apple did, and the Windows App Market was not even released until one year after Google broke ground. We compare both markets to see how they stack up to one another.

Developers

It turns out that although Android owns more than 50% of the total market share, developers still favor creating apps for Apple’s iOS platform. But in this case, we have cropped iOS out of the picture. So which market do developers favor now?

Membership Cost

Before you can even build an application for either market, both Google and Microsoft require that developers cough up some cash. For Windows Phone developers, Microsoft asks for $99 per year. And, if said developer wants to submit more than 100 free apps, Microsoft asks for $19.99 for each submission after that. Google, on the other hand, is asking for a $25 membership fee to keep “spammy” developers out of their market. However, $25 is not too much to ask for as a one-time investment.

SDK and Language

The Windows Phone SDK is comprised of multiple parts including Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, XNA Game Studio, and others. In addition to having the SDK, Microsoft suggests that you be familiar with Microsoft .NET Framework and C++ or Visual Basic. The Android SDK is available for Windows, Mac and even Linux, unlike the Windows Phone SDK being Windows only. Furthermore, most all Android apps are written in Java. But C/C++ apps are not forbidden from the market either.

Downloads and Fragmentation

The main source of developers not liking the Android platform is it’s seemingly inherent fragmentation. The Android platform is very staggered between builds and that makes it difficult for developers to make an app that works on all versions of Android. But that anger didn’t stop Windows Phone from going down the exact same path. With Windows Phone 8 on the way, rumor has it that Microsoft will only be releasing WP8 to the latest devices that are released in 2012. Therefore, this will leave developers stuck in between two different versions of Windows Phone. This could create a sticky situation and a possible opportunity for market share, should Android solve its ongoing fragmentation.

According to the Android.com developer website, “Users downloaded more than 2.4 billion apps in Q3 2011 alone”. Furthermore, Google recently beefed up the Android Market into “Google Play”, a books, music, movies, and apps hub that reaches hundreds of millions of users in over 130 countries.

Number of apps

AppBrain, a website for finding the best Android apps, tabulates the number of apps currently in the Google Play Store. At the time of the writing this article, the website claims that there were just over 430,000 apps in total. Furthermore, over 311,000 of those apps were free. That’s just about 72% of all of Google Play apps that are free.

On the other hand, Windows Phone Applist reports that there are currently 80,000 apps in the Windows App Market. Although this is a low number compared to that of Google Play’s 430,000 apps, this is a huge increase in apps for a market that was launched just over 2 years ago.

Microsoft’s Cloud vs. Google’s Cloud

If you own multiple devices, syncing all of your apps, music, and books would become a very tedious job. That is why both Google and Microsoft offer “cloud services”. SkyDrive (Microsoft’s cloud) has a robust initial offering of 7GB for your important files on all of your devices with apps for Windows, Mac, Windows Phone and even iPhone or iPad. If you were to purchase an app on your iPhone, it would show up on your iPad as well. However, SkyDrive is lacking one feature that I find very useful.

Instead of just storing your data online for you, Google took it one step further. When you visit Google Play, you can see all of your music, books, apps, and movies on any Internet connected device. Furthermore, you can even install apps to any of your devices directly from the desktop store. For example, after you find an app that you want, simply hit the install button and choose your device. Then, as long as your device is connected to the Internet, the download will begin automatically. Furthermore, Google Docs was recently re-named as Google Drive. Google Drive, similar to that of SkyDrive, comes with apps for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android. In addition, Google Drive offers you 5GB of total storage space between files, email, and Picasa photos.

User Interface

Google Play

The current design of Google Play has come a long way. With a few updates and the most recent name change to Google Play, I feel that Google has really done a nice job with the current design. With big and bold pictures, a feature of Ice Cream Sandwich, it is easy to find the best apps without having too much in your face. In addition, the new design takes advantage of the ‘sideways swiping’ feature found in most other Google apps. Swipe the whole screen left and right to find different categories and the top app lists (Top Free, Popular Apps, etc.)

Windows App Market

The Windows Phone App Marketplace has followed Windows Phone’s widely hailed “Metro” style user interface in the recent 7.5 Mango update. In addition, Windows and Google use similar categories to sort their apps. The only main difference between the two markets is that Google has chosen to use big and vibrant pictures to represent new and featured apps, books, movies, and music.

Although many people could argue that “ads” are just annoying, the makers behind the health app RunKeeper would disagree. After becoming featured in the Android Market, the app saw a significant increase in downloads. Finally, Lightbox was a featured app during the holiday season of 2011 and received the lions share of an estimated 1 billion plus downloads during that time period.

Content Management Client

It is no secret that Microsoft has been in the program and application business ever since it started. Furthermore, Microsoft had already been working on the Zune platform long before Windows Phone came into the picture. Therefore, the Zune Software is in use for Windows Phone users. The program can be used on your Windows PC and comes pre-loaded with access to a horde of music and videos. It also has the ability to move around media between your phone and computer. Finally, it can also install new software updates to your device.

On the other hand, Google created an online marketplace similar to the Chrome Web Store. Along with Google Play, previously known as Android Market, they have re-introduced their cloud management client. First used as an online music player, Google Play now allows you to manage all of your music, apps, books, and even movies. Furthermore, by visiting Google Play on any Internet connected device, you can play all of your music just like on iTunes. You can also read all of your books, and manage your movies and apps between your Android devices directly from the Google Play website. Finally, as mentioned before…

Re-Cap

As you can see, both markets are similar in a lot of ways. Due to the fact that Google’s market has been around longer, they have a substantially larger selection of apps. Microsoft on the other hand, has an advantage with the desktop client; they had the Zune series around to develop and implement at the right time. In the category of developers, Android has more users on their platform which would easily attract more developers. Microsoft has taken the route of paying developers to develop apps on their platform.

Which app store is your favorite? Is it about having more apps, or fewer apps of a higher quality? Let us know in the comments and poll below!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

NEXT: BOOM! Android Market Becomes Google Play Store, along with Google Music and Google Ebookstore [Updated]

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Market research reports appear all too often, but some of them seem very different or contracting. It’s important you know what type of market share the new chart represents and what the numbers show. Some of them show market share based on last quarter alone, which is all about *new* sales market share. Others, like this one here, show how many subscribers in *total* the main platforms have, while others are simply being misleading by combining data that doesn’t make sense.

Also, some  are for US while others are for global market share, so that’s always good to recognize, too, because the US and global market shares are not always very similar, although it seems that the US and global ones for Android are pretty similar this time around, but still not identical.

So what we have here is a US market share statistic for the total number of subscribers for all these companies. So when they say Google has a 47% market share, almost double of their next competitor Apple, what they mean is that out of the almost 100 million smartphones currently being owned in US, 47 million of them are Android smartphones, 29 million are iPhones (not sure if iPod Touches are still included in these), 16 million are Blackberries, less than 5 million are Windows Mobile and WP7 phones (mostly Windows Mobile ones), and a little over 1 million are Nokia Symbian phones.

Once again, this is not about the last quarter’s sales, it’s about the total number of mobile devices in US. The only part that shows something about new sales in this table is that “change” column, which shows how many percentage points they all gained (or lost) during the September-December period.

So for now it looks like Android is still the fastest growing platform in US, and it also has a user base that is almost double that of Apple in US for smartphones. If nothing else, this should at least put developers on their toes, because many of them live in US and develop mainly for the iPhone, when Android is already on twice as many phones there.

NEXT: Android Now Owns 42% of Smartphone Marketshare – comScore

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Remember Meego? Poor ol’ Meego has gone through a lot of transitions, from the original Maemo, to being merged with Intel’s Moblin, to now being merged once again with Samsung’s own OS, Bada, which will be made open source when it will be merged with Meego, and form Tizen. All Bada applications will work in Tizen, and if developers know how to make Bada apps, they should be able to make Tizen apps, too.

But why does Samsung want to support yet another OS? Or better yet, what are they trying to achieve by pushing Bada/Tizen even harder into the market? Samsun has at least several main reasons why it wants to do this.

Samsung wants more independence, first of all. While they have plenty of independence with Android, it’s not as much as they would like for a company of their size, which is set to overtake Nokia in all phone sales in 2012, and become world’s largest phone manufacturer (they are already smartphone king). Clearly, a company like Samsung doesn’t think any 3rd party should limit them too much.

But Android has proven extremely successful for them, so they will not give up on it anytime soon, if ever. However, they still want a strong alternative to Android. Google will have to restrict Android even more if it wants to provide a pretty unified experience to the Android users, and I’m guessing Samsung doesn’t like this too much, but there isn’t all that much they can do about it.

Bada has been reasonably successful for them, with a marketshare twice as big as all the WP7 phones put together from other manufacturers as well. But it’s still pretty small at around 4% globally. Plus, because of this they have to give WP7 a try and see how it goes, too. However, this pushes them even more towards being even more restricted by a 3rd party, which this time is Microsoft.

WP7 is far more restrictive than Android, in a sense that it allows them to do almost no customization whatsoever of the OS, and perhaps worse, it allows them to do almost no customization of the hardware components. This might not hurt them too much in the beginning when WP7′s market share is too small, and there aren’t too many WP7 competitors, but it would mean complete commodization under a bigger market share.

Tizen Software Architecture

So here we are, with Samsung trying one last push to be successful with their own OS, this time Tizen. Bada showed what I’ve been thinking since the very beginning. No “single-company proprietary OS” would’ve been successful against Apple. If you wanted to beat Apple and the iPhone, you just had to use a multi-company OS – an OS being supported and used by multiple manufacturers. Many people forget that it was hard even for Android to gain over iPhone in the beginning. A single-company OS has absolutely no chance. And it’s once again being proven by RIM and their QNX OS. That’s if we don’t even count the failures of both Palm and HP, who also tried to beat Apple with an OS that only they owned.

So Bada is a single-company proprietary OS, but Tizen will try to follow Android’s business model, of being open source, and also a multi-company OS. You would think this would hurt Android. That’s likely, but it really depends on the implementation and functionally of the OS. I have serious doubts that it can match Android in functionality in the near future. None of the mobile OS have been able to since Froyo. Android also has the huge app ecosystem, so it will be a big uphill battle there, too, which guarantees Android a lead of at least a few years, and given where Android is right now, it most likely means that lead will be permanent (read: 10-15 years until the next huge market disruption).

But what about Tizen vs WP7? I think it’s much more likely to become the #3 platform before WP7 even has a chance to pass 5% in the market. LG will definitely use it, too. They were going to use Meego as well, and we also learned a while ago that the South Korean Government wants both Samsung and LG to work on an open source OS. Well this is it. It’s Tizen. Sony will most likely use it, too, since they’ve been the only major manufacturer who hasn’t used anything but Android. That’s because they don’t like WP7 (neither does LG after their initial failure with it), and they will certainly welcome Tizen. Being open source, means other Asian companies like Huawei and ZTE or other no-name ones might give it a try, too.

Android will most likely stay at around a 50% market share globally, with iOS around 20% globally, and most of the rest 30% being taken by Tizen. Of course, these are just strategic assumptions. It still remains to be seen if Tizen will be any good, but Samsung has a pretty good software team, and my guess is this is why they’ve hired the CyanogenMod found, too. Hopefully, we get to see Tizen by the end of the year, because they still need to hurry if they want to become the #3 platform.

All they need to do is make it impressive, intuitive, add even more apps to the already existent Bada apps, and convince as many companies as possible to use it. It won’t be easy, but being open source, customizable and free will be huge advantages over WP7.

NEXT: Is Samsung Leaving Android?

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According to data gathered by comScore, Android was able to maintain its current top spot as the number one smartphone OS in the United States. Ever since November 2011, almost 46.9% of smartphone users in the US were using Android operating systems. This is a 3.1% improvement from its earlier rating from three months before. Indeed, this goes to show that Android has overtaken the popularity of Apple’s iOS in the smartphone industry, having only 28.7%. Third on the spot was Microsoft’s Windows Phone (5.2%) and followed by Symbian (1.5%).

After device activations surging over 300% during the holidays, it can only be expected that the market share between Android and iOS will continue to rise post Christmas. As we earlier reported, there were almost 1.5 million iPhones and Android devices daily activations from Dec. 1-20. But during Christmas day, the number jumped to a shocking 6.8 million devices.

Adding to the information gathered, the title for the top smartphone manufacturer was given to Samsung for having a total of 25.6% in its U.S. market. This was followed by LG and Motorola (respectively). On the fourth spot is Apple, having only 11.2%; while the last spot belonged to RIM, having 6.5%. Earlier, Samsung reported that they were able to sell over 300 million handsets in 2011. This is a milestone for the company who was able to reach this number for the first time.

Another data collected by comScore is the most popular activity people did on their smartphones, which is texting. Out of the 30,000 individuals tallied, 72.6% reported that they used their smartphones to send text messages. The next thing people did on their devices was to download apps (44.9%) and use their browser (44.4%).

Meanwhile, the most recent version of Android, the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, has already been released along with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. There are plans being made by other handset makers to include ICS OS into their devices, however, an exact date is still in the works.

NEXT: Android Soars to Number 1, Gets 36% Of Smartphone Sales This Year

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Nokia and Blackberry jump started mobile industry advancements around a decade ago but Apple’s introduction of the iPhone easily superseded these to gain a major presence in the consumer market. Then Google came up with Android and iOS superiority was no longer a given. According to how market experts analyze it, there are three main factors that gave the Android platform its quick ascent.

1. Almost exponential increase in the number of base installations and apps developed
2. Monthly, weekly and even daily innovations that crop up in hardware and software
3. Timely support from major mobile carriers

iOS and Android may currently be the leading contenders but Nokia, Blackberry and Windows Mobile are not yet out of the fight. How the mobile OS showdown will turn out in the next few years will depend on how these platforms address the following issues.

• Further product development and support from third party application developers
• Introduction of an innovation that would significantly impact user experience
• Moving on from the consumer market to gain more footing in the enterprise market
• Additional development in cloud computing

These are the areas of opportunity in which the other mobile platforms can still make noticeable headway and get back into the conversation. Microsoft products for example already have a footing in enterprise and would do well to somehow consolidate the various services into their mobile offering. Research in Motion meanwhile has yet to surprise the public with its next line of products based on QNX.

All in all, it won’t be surprising to see more acquisitions and new partnerships form in 2012 and beyond as these platforms wrestle to gain more space in the mobile industry.

Via DailyFinance

NEXT: Internal document reveals that Google will sell the Nexus One with support from T-Mobile

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Disappointing launch

Although, I figured Android would continue to grow and that Microsoft was too late to the game to actually “beat” Android when Windows Phone 7 launched late last year, I still expected it to do much better than it did. Right now they have a little over 1% in global sales, which means the WP7 growth actually slowed down after launch, when it was like 2%. Even Steve Ballmer predicted in May last year that there will be 30 million new phones with either Windows Mobile or Windows Phone 7 on them by the end of 2011 (I’m guessing he was thinking more about WP7 doing that than Windows Mobile). But instead of WP7 compensating for Windows Mobile’s fall, it seems they are both in a fast decline.

What happened?

While Microsoft put a reported $500 million in promoting WP7, either in advertising or in getting developers to make apps for the platforms, and in getting manufacturers to make phones for them, things didn’t go as smoothly as they hoped they will. The WP7 is indeed quite different from iOS and Android and the other mobile operating systems out there, but does that necessarily translate into a product consumers want to buy? So far it doesn’t look like it. It may be that people go into a store, see 20 devices with icons and such, something they are familiar with, and then see the odd WP7 phone. Would they be compelled to go and try that first? Something tells me that because the OS is so different from what they know, if anything, they will save it for last, and be interested in it only if they like the hardware design.

No carrier love

Speaking of stores, apparently the carriers aren’t too excited about pushing WP7 either. They may want a 3rd alternative to Android and the iPhone, but that doesn’t mean they will risk their own money promoting a product that won’t sell. When Android launched it was different. Most of them didn’t even have the iPhone, because Apple made exclusive deals with carriers all over the world. So they desperately needed an alternative. Android offered them that alternative, and then some, with dozens of new devices coming out in the past 2 years. With so many devices to choose from, and looking different enough from each other to sway a consumer to buy one or the other, the carriers don’t feel particularly in a rush to support another OS.

Microsoft has one last chance with the launch of WP7 Mango and Nokia releasing their first WP7 phone. If that doesn’t make WP7 get back on track, it may be the end of WP7 and Microsoft playing the smartphone game.

NEXT: Microsoft Getting Richer Because of Android

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[via PC World]

NEXT: Acer confirms Android lineup – up to 6 new handsets in the first half of 2010

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Acer A1 Liquid

Acer jumped head first into the smartphone market in 2009, releasing close to 10 handsets with only one, the A1 Liquid, running the Android OS. The A1′s status as Acer’s only Android handset in the midst of a a plethora of Windows Mobile handsets may soon change. According to Aymar de Lencquesaing, head of Acer’s mobile phone division, Acer will be offering a “much more balanced” portfolio in 2010, citing the momentum behind Android as the reason for this shift away from Windows Mobile. Doing the math, we can expect to see an additional 4-5 Acer-branded Android handsets in the upcoming year.

[via Slashgear]

NEXT: Upcoming Android netbooks from Acer to dual-boot Windows

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That’s a far cry from what we heard from the company in June, which led folks to believe that we’d see the Open Screen Project’s Flash 10 player for smartphones, including Android, this month.  Heck, now it is saying that it won’t be until next year when Android gets even a beta version of Flash 10.1 (I don’t know what happened to Flash 10.0 on smartphones, either).

This is going to really annoy many people.  Except, of course, HTC Hero users, who already enjoy good Flash support on their phones.

Adobe also announced that Google and Research In Motion have joined the Open Screen Project.

NEXT: Adobe confirm Flash Player 10 coming to Android in October

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If we back up a moment, the Touch HD is still considered a high-end device, and packs a huge 3.8’’ touch-screen display and all the higher-end connectivity options, including a 3.5mm headphone jack. However, not one to hang about, HTC are readying the Touch HD 2. According to Register Hardware, HTC told them directly at the event that the new Touch HD 2 will run the Android OS.

A separate source “familiar with HTC’s plans” also suggested that the “Touch HD 2 will be significantly faster than the original – and faster than the vast majority of HTC handsets to date.” To be more specific, the Touch HD 2 will use a 628MHz Qualcomm chip as opposed to the 528MHz Qualcomm processor that higher-end HTC devices use. To round off the rumors, the Touch HD 2 will also feature a 3.8’’ touch-screen, just like its predecessor.

All these rumors seem reasonable given HTC’s push into the Android market. However, HTC have always been a loyal Windows Mobile provider, and we shall have to wait and see whether there is any substance to the rumors that Register Hardware are spreading. We’ll do some digging ourselves and see if we can get hold of HTC so that they can comment and let you know.

NEXT: HTC Touch HD coming in Android flavor for T-Mobile?

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