Flipboard's Mike McCue and Evan Doll(Image credit: via @daylife)
Facebook are looking for employees to switch to Android from iOS, presumably so they can improve the Facebook experience on the smartphone platform with the largest market share. In black and white terms, that's a smart move by Facebook, but it also illustrates one of the biggest challenges that Android has a platform.
The decision makers in large Silicon Valley companies are predominantly iOS users, and that means the cool toys are going to make their debut on the handsets in their pockets. When you are starting a company it's advisable to solve a personal problem... and that means your personal tools will be the platform of choice for the initial application.
Android may have a global market-share in excess of any of the competition, but volume does not win hearts and minds. If there are resources for a second platform at launch, or a follow-up release after a successful iOS exclusive period, then Android is the obvious choice, but when the decision on one device has to be made, it tends to be iOS.
Mike McCue and Evan Doll's Flipboard set out to solve the problem of presenting aggregated content from the web in a fashionable way and make reading something exciting, rather than navigating a tree of RSS feeds. It made a huge splash when first released on the iPad in July 2010. An iPhone version followed a few months later.
The Android debut? May 2012, and even then it was with an exclusive arrangement with Samsung to put the app on the Galaxy S3 before becoming available for the rest of the Android platform a few months later.
Take Instagram, who made it a virtue of being an iOS only platform for as long as possible before allowing Android users in to the network. Time and again you see popular web services focusing on iOS and having Android pushed back to second place. It continues to happen to this day.
Thanks to a raft of low-end low-margin smartphones, Android is established as the dominant consumer platform around the world. But it is not established as the dominant platform with the people who will drive development forward. The people who will bring smart ideas to the app economy are not following the consumers, they are following the platform that lets them express themselves. Yes, in some cases that is Android, but the innovators are all sticking with Apple.
