Smartphones Sales Zooming, Android Ad Sales A Winner

Remember when Google was claiming an astounding 200,000 Android phone activations per day? Well, that's old news... now it's 300,000 per day. Poor Apple can only muster 270,000 iPhone activations per day. That's about 9 million Android phones per month, and about 8 million iPhones (with iPads and iPod Touches, I guess, being on top of that).

If only Android was a better moneymaker for developers... but here's some evidence that you can make money on Android. It's just not by getting people to pay for your app; you can make a lot of money selling ads. Rovio sells Angry Birds on the iPhone, and has done very well with that (over 6.5 million copies at a buck a pop isn't bad). Rovio doesn't sell Angry Birds on Android; they give it away for free. How do they make money" Advertising... AdMob is using Angry Birds as their poster child for advertising with them, as Angry Birds is bringing in $1 million a month to Rovio through selling ads. Not a bad income for a free app.

When Google finally gets it together and makes in-app purchasing in Android as easy as it is in iOS, there will be some serious money made. That is, if your game is designed around in-app purchasing... you have been thinking about that, haven't you?

The big loser in all of this is the handheld console. No in-app purchasing, no ad sales... you start looking at the list of what a 3DS can or can't do compared to a smartphone, and it's rather sad. Remember when the N-Gage came out and everyone laughed at the idea of playing games on a phone? They ain't laughing now. Dedicated handheld gaming devices are looking to line up a slot in museums right next to pocket calculators. The saddest part is that it's not so much the hardware that killed them, it's the business models that they couldn't adapt to.

Update: Oh, and if you were wondering about Blackberry? Fuhgeddaboutit. As example of what's happening to them, in the last year on Verizon Blackberry went from 90% share to less than 20% as Android phones ate their lunch. You think that's bad? Wait until the iPhone hits Verizon... Blackberry who? Those guys can have a nice chat with Nokia about what could possibly have happened to them.