The Fallacy of Android-First

Dave Feldman, co-founder of Emu:

We launched Emu for iPhone on April 2, and we’ve pulled Emu for Android out of the Play Store. We hope we’ll return to Android someday, but our team is too small to innovate and iterate on multiple platforms simultaneously. We’ve concluded iPhone is a better place to be:

  • Our decision to build on top of SMS/MMS involved huge, unanticipated technical hurdles.

  • Even when you don’t support older Android versions, fragmentation is a huge drain on resources.

  • Google’s tools and documentation are less advanced, and less stable, than Apple’s.

  • Android’s larger install base doesn’t translate into a larger addressable market.

A nuanced perspective.

★ Monday, 7 April 2014