Edible Apple

Yeah yeah, Apple’s record breaking earnings didn’t leave the folks on Wall Street singing Apple’s praises. But if we take a step back and discard that investor BS for a second, the sheer volume of iOS devices Apple sold last quarter is breathtaking: 47.8 million iPhones, 22.9 million iPads, and 7.9 million iPod Touches. That’s 78.6 million new iOS devices on the market today.

iOS developer David Smith takes these figures and notes:

Here are the only numbers in these announcements that I care about:

• 47.8M new iPhone sales. 6 new potential customers every second.
• 22.9M new iPad sales. 3 new potential customers every second.
• ~7.9M new iPod touch sales. 1 new potential customer every second.

I can’t think of anything more motivating as a developer than 10 new potential customers arriving to my platform every second.

As an ecosystem, iOS has never been more prevalent nor stronger. It may not mean much to fund managers at this very moment, but in the long term, the implications are huge.

On a related note, is it all that surprising that The Next Web back in December announced that they were going to stop producing an Android version of their weekly TNW Magazine?

With every issue we published we also received a lot of requests for an Android version of the magazine. We had bought a Kindle Fire and a Nexus 7 and Mag+ offered support for both platforms, so we played around with it a bit and ended up publishing a version for Android.

To be honest; it wasn’t easy. In theory you simply adjust for a different format and platform and do a new export. But then trouble starts. As one developer put it to us: “You make a beautiful magazine for the iPad, and then you dumb it down for Android’.

That meant removing movies, sound, interactivity and content. But even then we had to deal with frequent crashes, a less intuitive interface and a platform that is even more fragmented than iOS.

via David Smith