The Tablet Apps Fallacy

With the release of the iPad Mini, Apple's marketing spin machine is back in action. One of their core talking points with their iPad line is how many "tablet apps" they have in their app market compared the competition. At this point they're touting 275,000 "tablet optimized" apps. Sounds pretty impressive doesn't it? I have to admit I used to think this was a real Apple advantage too until I thought about it and realized it's really all nonsense. Here's what Apple is really saying. "iOS and our iOS development tools are so poorly designed that developers have to create separate versions of their app which are optimized for each of our devices." You see, while Apple spouts on about how few tablet apps there are in the Android market while they have 275,000 in theirs, the real story is that Android doesn't require a separate, special tablet version of each app. The fact is that the Android OS and the developer kit allow a developer to create a single app that works on all or most devices. I don't mean just scaling up the same screens to a larger size, but actually providing a different interface based on the capabilities of the current device. Want proof? If you have both a Nexus 7 and a Galaxy Nexus* go look at any of the following apps on both devices and look at how the same app changes to accommodate the display of the device they are running on. Note that these are just a few to demonstrate what we're discussing. Not a comprehensive list of apps that take advantage of this.

• Gmail
• Evernote
• Google+
• Pulse

See the difference?

The reality is that with Android, developers can create one single app that runs on all devices and optimizes for the available display size and resolution. No "tablet optimized" apps are necessary. This means that basically Android tablets have access to all the apps in the Play market, not just select few. 

The only real exception to this is with games. In this case because we are talking about providing additional textures and maps etc. for different devices, app sizes become cumbersome so most game developers kindly provide HD versions of their games for tablet devices and phone users with HD screens that choose to run the HD version. But this is an issue of providing choice, not a limitation of the OS.

Caveats

I want to point this out before any Apple fanboi types say something.

Apps created for Android versions previous to Honeycomb / Ice Cream Sandwich will need to be updated by the developer to work on both tablets and phones smoothly. This is because tablet devices were not supported by Android or the Android dev kit in Gingerbread or earlier. All tablet devices previous to Honeycomb were unofficial and used hacked versions of Android created by the manufacturer of the device. Any fragmentation in this segment was not created by Google, but by third parties with unsupported devices with unofficial versions of Android. Also, Apple does provide some tools to assist developers with this, but it's much easier to do on Android as the system handles most of the work.

*I'm using the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Nexus in this example because they are both Pure Android devices and are not subject to any OEM changes to the OS that could break this feature of the Android OS.They also both will have the same version of the latest release of Android which will make such a comparison an apples to apples comparison.