When you take a look at the global smartphone picture, Google's Android operating system essentially dominates Apple's iOS.
But when it comes to one of the mobile arena's fastest growing arenas, video games, iOS ends up cleaning Android's clock. Why is that?
Some developers have pinned the blame on fragmentation in the Android market. Most users are still running software that's two years old, like Gingerbread, making it difficult to optimize games for the whole user base.
As Wired points out, pretty much every good game on Android is also on iOS — but not the other way around.
"For us, it's a matter of having limited time," said Kepa Auwae, maker of Punch Quest, to Wired. "So we have to choose one platform as our main focus. iOS wins out because games on there still make more money, while also having less support issues due to device fragmentation."
That's one reason why many developers continue to develop primarily with iOS in mind, even though Android holds nearly 70 percent of the global market. They have a better chance to make money with an iOS release and, if they do, then they start thinking about an Android port. Even then, ports might not arrive until almost a year after their iOS debut.
As Wired noted, there are less than 20 versions of iOS for Apple's mobile devices. In comparison, the developers behind the Android app Open Signal discovered that they were running on more than 3,000 different products.
"From a testing and quality assurance perspective, the scope is narrower if you're making a game for, say, just the iPad 2 and newer, as opposed to many different Android tablets you'd have to purchase and test on," said Supergiant Games creative director Greg Kasavin.
CEO of developer Auxbrain, Kevin Pazirandeh, added that if a company has the money, there's too much opportunity on Android to simply pass up developing for it. At the same time, he'd say about 95 percent of the games launching on iOS are hoping to make enough money for their creators so that they could afford an Android kit to test the game on.
The good news for Android fans is that Apple's advantage when it comes to game development is not because creators don't want to put their titles on Android. If Google wants to keep its devices up-to-date with the latest software, though, it might need to figure out how to solve its persistent fragmentation issues.
