Blogging at the nexus of culture and mobility
Android’s Museum App Gap
Lately there have been headlines such as the one today by Mashable touting “Android Wins in the U.S. Smartphone Wars“. According to Neilson the Android OS was installed on 29% of the post-paid smartphones in the US between November 2010 and February 2011, with iOS and RIM devices at 27% each. Given these type of headlines, last week in a post entitled, “Museums vs Android“, Vincent Roman asked, why the dearth of museum apps for Android? Vincent and I have been corresponding over this for a bit now as I have been looking to add more information about Android apps to Museums2Go. Vincent will soon be contributing reviews of Android apps here. But first Vincent and I wanted to get as accurate a picture as we could on the state of museum apps with respect to these two mobile OS’s. 
As of March 2, I’ve identified 181 iPhone apps associated with museums and cultural institutions and only 34 such Android apps (in English and available in the U.S.). I double checked each of the 181 iPhone apps to see if there was an equivalent Android app in the Android Market and found only 31 such apps. There are three Android muesum apps not available on the iPhone (Racing Museum, Search the Collections, and Zeum USSF). Additionally Vincent aided in scouring the Android Market for museum apps, double checking every nook and cranny of the Android Market. In short this means there are more than five times as many iPhone apps as Android apps for museums and cultural institutions. That’s the easy part to uncover. A little trickier would be the why.
Let me state that I have no interest in pushing one mobile OS over another. Or pushing native apps over web apps. (Full disclosure-I worked for Apple for almost ten years). What I’m interested in is providing the best mobile experience for museum and cultural institutions and to the most owners of mobile devices. Whichever means can achieve this goal while maintaining a quality experience then so be it. Having said that though it is an interesting question to ask, why the Android museum app gap?
Rather than this being a reflection of how cultural institutions are exhibiting a bias I think this app gap is more reflective
of the state of the Android Market versus Apple’s App Store. First, Google has already indicated their unhappiness with the state of Android app sales. Second, when you compare the number of developers for each OS you see that between August 2010 and February 2011 the Apple App Store attracted 24K versus the Android Market attracting just over 4K developers. One frequently reads of Android developers being frustrated with the increasing fragmentation of the Android market. With one stating that frankly, “Being an Android developer is generally not a lucrative undertaking” . Whereas yesterday Apple announced that developers have earned $2 billion from Apple’s App Store. As such there is a wide discrepancy overall in the number of apps available on the App Store (350,000) versus the Android Market (100,000). While the gap in museum apps between the OS’s is a bit larger (5X vs 3.5X) it isn’t out of line with the overall mobile marketplace for smartphone apps. A gap which is underscored most dramatically in the 82% market share (at $1.8 billion) the Apple App store has for paid apps versus the 4.7% market share (at $102 million) which the Android Market has. Even Angry Birds has a substantial gap between the 12 million iPhone users and the 5 million Android users. And if they can’t close that gap with headlines about Android’s leading market share then who can?
Furthermore, developers have been complaining about how “the Android Market app is buggy” and that processing payments is not a simple affair (in contrast to the App Store). One blogger continues the list of Android developer frustrations noting that “While iPhone apps are backward compatible with all previous devices, the Android scenery is very fragmented. An Android developer that wants to make a universally compatible app would have to test it on more than 200 devices. Add to this the fact that Android devices are available in only 32 countries, while the iPhone can be bought in 90, the winner of the money race appears clear for now”.
In light of the above the real question may be is the Android Market ready for museums to devote scarce resources to developing native apps for at present. Or this all may be as Vincent later notes an argument for developing web apps rather than native apps. As I stated earlier I’m not trying to push one mobile OS over another in this post only to note that I don’t think that Android’s museum app gap is reflective of any greater bias on the part of museums than that of the broader mobile app marketplace.
One of the indicators used by museums to determine whether they have a ‘natural’ market for mobile apps and which platform they choose to develop on is their existing website mobile traffic. This more accurately reflects the demographics of the existing museum audience and mobiles – and should be able to be used to predict trends in the medium term.
Given our existing mobile web traffic we’re seeing a 90/10 split between iOS and Android, if we weren’t doing an iOS app then we’d be far more likely to look towards a mobile web app over a native Android app.
Hello, Thank you for your report and the time it took to put this together. I enjoy your postings. I’ve always wondered why museums might want mobile apps, and especially those that are to be used in conjunction with an exhibit, whilst your visiting a museum. Surely the experience is interrupted when your constantly looking down at your mobile device rather then what your supposed to be doing which is enjoying being in person at the venue.
I would like to know how folks use the apps and if they use them during a museum visit? I ask this because in light of recent web writings about the ‘responsive web’ and how a website, on whatever device it is viewed offers a tailored experience. I can explain…
If your not up on the recent web trends a museum website can use media queries to detect a devices resolution and then ‘nip and tuck’ content depending on that device. So a mobile device will offer to the user visiting info, opening times, and whats on content. All the content you need when you have the least time when your out and about.
I believe this is what we should be developing, the website and web apps. To develop a website that works on every device without the need for the visitor to download an app for every museum visited and their every exhibit.
Thanking you
We are seeing a 70/30 split on iOS verses Android traffic and are considering a port of our existing app but I think that what might be behind a general lack of Museum Android apps is that adoption for most iOS apps is lower than expected. Most museums are now taking a wait and see approach before expending staff time or treasure on more development that may only pay off minimally in the foreseeable future.
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FT.com just released their new mobile app – all shiny html5, 50mb browser storage etc. Notably they have dropped their native iOS app in favour of HTML5. They were not happy with iStore policies and wanted to multi platform, will be rolling out to android, bb in due course.. The app is free for the next week, I think.
Web apps are what our cultural institutions should be watching rather than making more work for themselves and developing for the many devices out there.
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