So your question boils down to "which platform should I target to get the most money" ?


You will need to figure out some things on your own:

On the income side:
* Who exactly is the target customer?
* How many potential customers are there?
* How many potential customers own the device?
* How much money will the potential customers pay?
* How much competition is there?
* How many potential customers will actually buy?
(These numbers are very difficult to predict until you have released several products.)

On the expenses side:
* How much will it cost to develop the product?
* How much will it cost to advertise and market the product?
* How much will it cost to host/release/publish the product?
* How much will it cost to support the product?

Subtract the latter from the former to estimate your profit (or loss).


The details about processor speeds, screen sizes, and supported programming languages are small details compared to the other questions. They factor in to the target customer, what the target customer owns, and the development and support costs.

As examples:
You can develop an excellent product, but have a mismatch between the customers and the devices they own so nobody will buy. You can have a great product that only phone crackers love, and end up with millions of users but almost zero sales. You can have the perfect game, but be buried in obscurity by failing to market your product. You can have a perfect game but charge the wrong amount for it so it never takes off. ...

As you can hopefully see, those factors are very small in the grand scheme of things.

I worked in mobile games dev for the last 7 years, and in my opinion you currently only have one choice as a relatively inexperienced lone developer - iPhone. It has huge market share, basically a single device for you to target, and a method of globally publishing your game.

Android doesn't have the market share for now, although it will be interesting to see what happens this year.

Any other platform means lots of different hardware configurations if you're going to cover enough devices to stand a chance of making money. Not to mention all the testing required, dealing with carriers, setting up web pages to sell your app, etc.

Of course iPhone dev means you face a different problem of a saturated and very competitive market, but small dev teams can still make money with a cool game/app and a little bit of marketing.

Quote:Original post by dangerdaveCS
My (limited) understanding of developing for iPhone, for example, is that you need to sell your soul to Apple, then buy it back for a ridiculous price, just to publish a game on their market.

You need to buy a Mac and an iPhone and pay us$99 to join the developer program. After that all dev tools are free and you pay nothing to get your game approved/published. You then get 70% of sales.


Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

If you want to make money your only choice is the iPhone really (This isn't to say that you are guarenteed to make any money).

You can develop native code for the Android using the NDK but if you want to sell your apps the Android platform is almost a complete no go. The platform is rife with pirecy and any game released on the android store is readily available to download from the internet with nobody even challeinging it.

Symbian is a pain to develop for if you want to target these phones you are better just targetting J2ME as most symbian devices will run Java the same goes for windows mobile.

You could try blackberry as they have a pretty nice store available for users and from what I've heard the Blackberry app store has a pretty good conversion rate.


The information you have heard about selling your soul to apple is complete and utter BS. It costs $99 to develop iPhone apps which is fairly reasonable. You also have to pay to release apps on the android store, the microsoft mobile store, the blackberry store and pretty much any online store for mobile devices.

I'm one of those relatively inexperienced lone developers who started out developing for Android last April. I'm going to have to disagree with MisterMoot and Buster2000 here. In my experience Android is already a viable market for an indie developer. For the past three months I've generated revenue equivalent to a decent salary. I'm currently a graduate student, but I'm seriously considering making mobile game development a full-time job.

Buster's comment implies that sales are the only way to generate revenue. I monetize via both sales and ads, with each source providing roughly half my revenue each month.

The iPhone is by far the biggest app market right now, but that also means that competition is far fiercer, visibility is more difficult, and you're going up against top-tier publishers with far bigger development and marketing budgets. But the potential payoff is much greater than any other mobile platform. By contrast, Android has a smaller, but still sizeable, game market. That means the top 10 arcade games on the iPhone are going to make far more money than the top 10 arcade games on Android, but it also means it will be easier for you to break into the top 10 on Android. There's less competition on Android, and also more demand. I regularly browse the forums and see constant requests on Android for ports of popular iPhone games such as Paper Toss and Ragdoll Blaster from people who have made the switch from iPhone to Android.

If you're familiar with Android, you know that it supports OpenGL ES, and as Buster mentioned, you can always develop with the NDK. Multiple hardware/firmware configurations are a concern, but really no more than developing for the PC.

Right now the safer bet in terms of ROI is probably the iPhone, but I just needed to set the record straight for those who say Android isn't viable at all right now, because it is. And if you're already more familiar with the platform and the language, you might want to strongly consider that route.

Thanks for the post Polyclef, I stand corrected. Good to hear that people can potentially make a living from Android.

Another platform is Nokia's Maemo (only N900 at this moment). Don't laugh just yet, there are so few games for it right now that you have a good chance to stand out. In fact it's almost impossible not to get attention if you develop a half decent game :)

It's a very decent platform to develop on, especially if you have some linux experience. You could consider making a port to the N900 of your IPhone games. Rovio did that with Angry Birds, which has got almost the same amount of downloads in one week on the N900 as it has on the IPhone in six weeks.

You could develop your games for Android using Java, then convert them to iPhone. There are many tools online that lets you do that, without the users needing a jailbroken iphone. And many people have succeeded with it so far.

Commercial Solution
Free solution

This could give you the benefit of hitting two popular platforms by writing the code just once.