| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgYi-6Upldg |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kw1ezst07y3kw0awt34vsx8r |
| Readwise ID | 01kw1ezst07y3kw0awt34vsx8r |
| Author | Adam Lyttle |
| Category | video |
| Site | YouTube |
| Published | 2025-04-30 |
| Saved | 2026-06-26T07:58:24.576000+00:00 |
| Tags | adam-lyttle, app-development |
Readwise Summary: The author stopped making Android apps because they earned much less money and faced many technical problems. Android users prefer ads over paying for apps, making it hard to earn well. Building and updating iOS apps is easier and faster, so the author now focuses only on Apple devices.
It’s one of the most common questions I get. Why don’t you build Android apps? Well, I used to actually, and they were doing quite well, if I say so myself, generating tens of thousands of downloads every month while outperforming my apps in the App Store in terms of revenue, monthly downloads, and even daily users. But in 2023, I noticed something which changed my opinion forever and would ultimately lead me to completely abandon my Android apps. In this video, I’m going to show
you why building for Android was a mistake, especially when you’re building small consumer app portfolios and the reasons which led me to completely abandon Android altogether. At face value, the decision just doesn’t make sense. My Google paycheck was consistently $2,000 to $3,000 every month. By comparison, my app store paycheck was only around $800. Having my apps on both Android and
the App Store meant I was being paid every other week. Beginning of the month was from Apple and middle of the month was from Google. Most people assume it’s smart business to put your app on both platforms, but I found this to be wrong. Here’s my top three reasons why I abandon Android on speedrun. Reason number one, the lifetime value of Android users is just much lower. Much, much lower. For 10,000 downloads, I
would generally generate around about $1,000 in revenue. The same number of downloads on the app store would generate around about $5,000 to $10,000. So, for every one download you generate from the app store, you get five to 10 times more revenue. That’s pretty much a no-brainer. Reason number two, Android users would just prefer to watch a 30-second ad than even pay for a $299 subscription. My apps were ad supported.
This was an intentional frustration point, hoping users who would use the app regularly would opt to upgrade instead of wasting their time watching ads. But no, on Android, they still refuse to upgrade, even when I dropped the prices down to $2.99 per year. And you just need a lot more daily users to get any meaningful revenue from ads. My little independent development budget just couldn’t justify the download
volume I would need just to break even. Number three, it was simply timeconuming to keep the Google Play account updated. Even today when I log in, I’m alerted my apps are not compliant. My account will be suspended and my apps will be removed. This seems to be a consistent battle with Google, not to mention just how many Android devices you need to test and support on from the latest Android phones to obscure an outright
fantastical models. Google Play tells me there are 20,070 supported device models for just one of my apps. Meanwhile, if I build an app on the App Store and I target iOS 16 and above, I’ll have to just support 23 iPhone models, each with similar screen resolution, architecture, and form factor. As an independent app developer, if I wanted to build fast, try new
things, and not get too caught up in the technical details, Android was just not a good fit. I found myself stuck in Google’s red tape and support requests on devices I never even heard of. Mind you, this is going back to 2022. Things may have changed a little bit since then, but I kind of doubt it. Let me know in the comments below if they have improved or not. So, while most of my development time was being stuck on
Android trying to support every device under the sun, the return on investment just was not as good. At the time I was building apps in a platform called Cordova. This is a platform that lets you build in native JavaScript or any other web language for that matter and package it up as both an Android app and an iPhone app. These are called hybrid apps because they’re kind of like apps but kind of not. To the average user, they just couldn’t tell the difference.
Sure, you would get the occasional review telling the app looks old, but most of the time users just didn’t care. And if it wasn’t for Cordova and it wasn’t for the Google Play Store, I probably wouldn’t even be an app developer today. My background was web development. So, I knew how to create front end and backend using webdev skills. In fact, my entire Windows setup was set up just for building web apps. With a few simple changes to my
development process, Google Play offered me a quick and easy way to create and launch apps onto the Google Play Store. This was my first steps as an app developer and I made my first dollar through the Google Play Store. It felt easy. Cordova was crossplatform and it seemed easy enough to compile the same code as an iPhone app, but you had to buy a MacBook. This was not a path that I ever considered. I had been a Windows
user for decades and would laugh at the design type people who would buy overpriced MacBooks just to use Photoshop. Fast forward to 2025 and I got two MacBooks, an Apple Watch, an iPad, iPhone, AirPod Max, you name it. But it wasn’t always like this. And in 2020, I bought myself a secondhand broken MacBook just so I could compile the code and release it onto the app store. And something happened. Something
that will change my app development trajectory forever. It was like trying candy for the first time in my life. What is this sweet taste? Where has this been my whole life? If I thought it was easy building Android apps, turns out building iPhone apps was even easier. You’re telling me you can just use Xcode and with a click of a button, upload it to the App Store. There’s no need to sign each individual build. No need to
manually upload files. And you can test on every iPhone and iPad model ever existing on the same programming software. They’re really on to something magical with this. Just you got to admit it. Now, my entire MacBook setup feels like a welloiled machine to build, test, and deploy apps. My Android setup, by comparison, feels fragmented, old, clunky, and timeconuming. So, in 2023, I
reached a crossroads. Cordova was no longer as well supported as it was in the past. And when new versions of Android came out, they call them things like KitKat or whatever that whatever it was called, I was forced to recompile all of my apps using their new SDK. If I didn’t, my apps would be completely removed. But KDOA was not as widely supported anymore, and getting the SDK to work was becoming harder and harder to get right until I decided enough is
enough. I’m going to learn a real programming language and start building only for iOS. I wonder if you’ve had similar experiences with Android apps. Has it improved over the last few years? And should I do a video like this on why I chose Swift UI over Flutter? Let me know in the comments below.