More Bad News For Android Apps

Stories about the difficulty, and even futility, of making decent revenue from apps published on Google's Android Market are legion. I am no exception, having written most recently on the topic earlier this week. I want to draw attention to this story about Gameloft and their negative experience. Without meaning to demean the longstanding complaints of 1-man and 2-man app shops, I think it's important when even a mid-size commercial app developer -- in this case, games -- expresses the same concerns:

"We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like ... many others," Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said at an investor conference...mostly due to weaknesses of Android's application store..."Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue," Rochefort said.

The reason for my concern is that I expect that larger, more-established companies have better and more frequent opportunities to engage with the organizations such as Google that individual developers do not. We know very well that the folks at Google Checkout and Android Market are notoriously uncommunicative and unhelpful with their customers: merchants and ISVs. I do not know if an outfit like Gameloft has better communications channels than the larger community, however my own business experience says that it is reasonable to assume that they do. If they do not, that is a further worry about the commercial maturity of these Google operations.

So when Gameloft says they can get no joy from the Android Market and are going to abandon products for the Android platform for at least the short term, I have to wonder what they know that they are not telling us. Are they getting unacceptably vague feedback from Google regarding improvements, or even a complete unwillingness to talk? Are they unimpressed with the prospects for brand-name alternatives, and especially carrier app stores?

Hope is not acceptable in a business plan. Tying a company's success to the unfulfilled promise of Checkout and Market must not be absolute: contingencies are required. I am interpretting Gameloft's message as saying that they see no suitable alternatives on which they can plan their business. That's troubling.