This feature has been written by Owen Faraday, the editor of mobile games blog <a href="http://pockettactics.com/" data-bitly-type="bitly_hover_card">Pocket Tactics</a>

There's an elephant in the mobile gaming room. Games writers try to avoid mentioning it for fear of inciting the loyalists on either side. But the elephant remains: let's just talk about it, shall we?

Android gaming stinks.


Pitchforks down, please. It gives me no pleasure to say it, but it's true. Compared to iOS, Android is a desolate wasteland when it comes to games.

We are now five years into the touchscreen smartphone revolution, and Google's Android operating system is by many measures ahead of its only significant rival, Apple. Most of the smartphones in the United States are Android devices -- Nielsen estimates that Google's devices make up 51 percent of the American smartphone market, with Apple's iPhone holding a comparatively modest share of 34 percent. The UK market has a similar stratigraphy. Android enjoys the backing of Google, a company that is synonymous with the internet itself -- as well as dozens of mobile technology giants the world over. Whereas Apple is the sole manufacturer of the iPhone with new models being released once a year or so, more than 600 different Android devices have been released in the last four years.

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So why then isn't the status of the Android gaming scene commensurate with its lofty market position? For some reason, Android's significantly larger base of users doesn't attract game developers the way Apple's iOS does.

Angry Birds, the household name franchise that elevated mobile games into popular consciousness, and claims David Cameron and Salman Rushdie among its many fans, made its debut on iOS in December of 2009. Developers at Rovio didn't make the jump to Android until October 2010. The Angry Birds were a global entertainment brand selling plush dolls and velcro wallets before ever appearing on an Android device.


More subjectively, the arthouse mobile titles that pique the interest of game critics have all been iPhone and iPad games.

Sword & Sworcery EP, which won the 2011 game of the year award from a number of mobile gaming blogs, including TouchArcade, is exclusive to iOS. Sword & Sworcery devs the Superbrothers have stated unequivocally that they have no interest in porting it to Android.

Top-flight indie developers like TigerStyle, Rocketcat, Coding Monkeys, and Nimblebit either don't develop for Android at all, or outsource their Android development to third parties long after their iOS versions have launched. Of the twenty games that were nominated for Best Mobile/Tablet Game at the Golden Joysticks this year, only eight are available for Android -- and not a single one is an Android exclusive.

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This is not a phenomenon restricted to the hip ivory towers of indie gaming. None of the top-selling Android games as of this writing are Android exclusives, whereas three of the top 15 best-selling games on the iPhone paid apps chart are only available on that platform. Even comparing like for like, games sell better on iPhone. "Android has huge numbers of users, yet from the sales figures I've seen from developers who have put games on both Android and iOS, the iOS version always receives far more purchases than the Android version," Mike Rose, UK editor at games industry magazine Gamasutra told me.


That's the width, breadth, and general demeanour of our elephant. If you accept that it exists, we can move on to a much more interesting question: why is it there? Why aren't the most creative, innovative game developers creating content for Android?

Android users don't buy games

There's a perception among developers that Android users are cheap penny-pinchers, like the guy who comes into the newsstand and leafs through the sport pages but never walks out with a purchase.

Rocketcat Games' Kepa Auwae, the maker of App Store hits such as

Hook Champ and Mage Gauntlet voices a typical opinion. "Sure, you have a huge install base. But then you have a disjointed storefront and customer base that seems to generally prefer completely free games."

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The games Rocketcat tend towards are fast-moving platform action games, which are the blockbuster crowd-pleasers of the gaming world. Makers of more niche titles know that their games have a narrower appeal, shrinking returns-on-investment and making Android's reputation for freeloading users that much more worrisome. "Android users expect to get apps for free or at least very cheap, but priced at $4.99 our game is more of a premium product," Sebastian Palkowski, the maker of baseball simulation

iOOTP told me. A cult hit on PC and Mac, the

iOOTP games are extremely labour-intensive to produce, and Palkowski fears he couldn't ever make a profit on Android. "We can't sell it for less, so I'm not 100 percent sure we are a great fit [for Android]."

There's hard data to back up the developers' fears. A survey conducted by Android app makers Swiftkey in 2011 found that 39 percent of iPhone users had more than 20 paid apps on their device, compared to just 10 percent of Android users with the same tally. A remarkable 12 percent of Android users had no paid apps at all -- four times the proportion of "paid-app refusers" on iOS. Swiftkey repeated the survey in 2012 and found that the gap was closing, but still present.

What accounts for this difference in attitudes towards paid apps is a matter of conjecture. Veteran tech blogger (and admitted Apple partisan) Jon Gruber hypothesises that most iPhone buyers are buying into the Apple smartphone ecosystem with their eyes wide open -- apps are part of the core selling proposition for iOS devices. A big part of Android's enormous lead in market share, Gruber contends, is unsophisticated consumers who aren't interested in apps at all. "Customers go to their existing carrier's retail store to buy a new phone, listen to the recommendations of the sales staff, and buy one of the recommended phones. Tens -- hundreds? -- of millions of people have done this and walked out of the store with a new Android handset."

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If Gruber's right, Android's larger userbase could be akin to Microsoft Internet Explorer's long-held lead in the browser wars.

Once a technology goes mass market, most users of it will by definition be un-savvy late adopters.

Android's Pirate Problem

While a wide swath of Android owners aren't interested in buying apps, there are plenty who more than happy to steal them. "Developers aren't so happy about Android, and what it honestly all comes down to is the rampant piracy," says Gamasutra's Rose.

There's no shortage of game developers' stories about Android piracy -- ranging across genres from cute kid-friendly puzzle games like Cut the Rope to violent shooters like Dead Trigger. But perhaps the most brazen Android piracy story is Sports Interactive's. SI produces both iPhone and Android editions of its ubiquitous soccer sim franchise Football Manager. In April, SI director Miles Jacobson told Eurogamer that Football Manager Handheld for Android was the most-pirated game in his firm's history, counting nine illegally downloaded copies for every one that had been legitimately purchased. By comparison, the highest rate of piracy that SI had ever seen on the PC (the platform where widespread software piracy was born) was just five to one. The massive disparity had Sports Interactive weighing whether it was worth continuing to support the Android platform at all.

Many of the developers I spoke to echoed Jacobson's concerns.

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Ironhide Game Studio's iPhone tower defence game Kingdom Rush was a top ten App Store hit in 56 countries but is only now being ported to Android. I asked Ironhide's Alvaro Azofra what it would take get his team to prioritise Android development. "The main reason we develop for iOS first is because there is this perception that the iOS market is way stronger than Android's. What will it take? Less piracy would help."

Limited time

Go to the Facebook page of just about any iOS-exclusive game -- Android users howling for games to be ported across the aisle to their platform are a common sight.

While Android partisans are sometimes quick to ascribe slowly progressing or non-existent Android ports to enmity, the reality is that many of the most popular mobile games today are made by tiny studios who lack the resources to develop for both platforms.

John Meindersee of Campfire Creations, a small San Francisco-area studio currently working on an iPhone version of the popular board game Stone Age wishes his product could launch on every platform simultaneously. "It's not that we don't want to do Android. You can only have one lead platform, and it just makes sense to go with a market where there's a lower barrier to entry. iOS just makes a lot more sense for a first go."

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Aside from developers' common perceptions of Android as the realm of aloof non-buyers and pirates, developing for Android entails coding and testing for a huge range of different devices.

Meindersee's business partner Chris Schwass sees Android hardware makers' free rein to create devices of all shapes and sizes as an obstacle. "That freedom is a hindrance to develop for. Developing for the App Store simplifies things. You don't get lost in the weeds with different aspect ratios, different screen sizes."

Rocketcat's Auwae sees developing for the panoply of Android devices as an opportunity cost against making more games. "We're a really small studio, so we can't really devote any resources to porting. Porting a game to another platform completely prevents us from working on a new game. Android ports are especially troubling, because you have to support a huge variety of hardware."

Some indie developers hand off the development of Android versions of their successful iOS games to third parties. Nimblebit, the San Diego-based makers of Tiny Tower and

Pocket Planes delegate porting their titles to Android to Asian developer Mobage, for example. For a niche developer balancing on a narrow profit margin, bringing in outside help is a difficult proposition. "If [went with a third party] we would either need to receive an ongoing royalty from the ported version, or charge so much that it could take a very long time before the Android version could sell enough copies at $6.99 (£4.34) to recoup the investment in high-powered programming talent," said Todd Templeman, who ported his 1990s PC hit

Ascendancy to iPhone with his studio The Logic Factory last year.

With the current profusion of middleware and development frameworks, we're in a golden age of indie games -- but the most talented of those devs are choosing to develop for iPhone first and Android second -- if ever. Strangely, it's the very features that Google touts as Android's unique selling points -- the openness of the Google Play Store (nee Android Market) and the freedom of hardware makers to iterate new devices that is driving developers away.


Gaming as a whole would benefit tremendously from a healthy, thriving Android game market that isn't just a port of last call for iOS developers, but it's not looking good. While Android users may finally be starting to buy apps in numbers that rival those of iPhone owners, there's no sign that piracy is abating. The device fragmentation that shuts out small devs with limited resources is only getting worse as Amazon doubles down on their Kindle tablets -- which are driven by a version of Android forked off from Google's main branch. Amazon's emphasis on its own version of Android add another set of devices that devs must test their apps on if they want to support one of the Android market's most important constituents.

For as much as I try to stay neutral, Gamasutra's Rose doesn't shy away from describing himself as an Android partisan. "Waiting for all the best mobile games to come over to my damn smartphone can be rather annoying at times," he says. But someday if Android gets its house in order, iOS and Android might be on even footing, right? "That's never going to happen," Rose says, "so it's pointless fantasising about it."

Correction: Angry Birds was first released for Android in October 2010, not March 2011.