Two Million Angry Birds Downloads on Android – Wow
Okay, so, here’s what happens when you have a huge installed base as Android has managed to build up over the last year or so: a major app is released on the platform, and in two days two million people download it. Now, granted, Angry Birds is a “free” app, being ad-supported, but even so that’s an impressive feat. For that to happen on webOS, we’d need to see pretty much every webOS user on the planet download an app.
It may be a bit obvious to point out, but those kinds of numbers help explain why we don’t see the kind of developer support on webOS that we’d like. While Angry Birds was much, much easier to port to webOS than to Android, getting two million people to download it and start clicking ads certainly makes the effort worthwhile. Rovio Mobile hasn’t released sales numbers for webOS, but I’m guessing they’re somewhat significantly south of two million downloads.
We’ll get there eventually, once more devices are released running webOS. In the meantime, I just have to say: wow, two million downloads in two days is impressive.
Update: It was a long weekend, so I think some folks might have taken this post the wrong way. So let me stress: webOS will get there, and we’ll get the developer support we’ve been waiting for. My point, really, is that it really does take a certain critical mass for this kind of response to occur, and webOS isn’t quite there yet.
Update 2: The folks at Minyanville.com made some very important points about the Android – Any Birds phenomenon. Go read the whole thing, but here’s a summary:
- Folks are hankering for Android games.
- Folks like free apps on Android (which I personally think will kill the platform eventually).
- It helped that apps can be distributed outside of the Android market (which I think is a real strength of webOS as well).
- Developers are starting to look at Android as a relevant gaming platform.
- Porting apps to Android is harder than some other platforms (e.g., and most strikingly, webOS). This is because of Android fragmentation, and hopefully this is something that HP/Palm will be able to mitigate as we see more and different devices running webOS. Probably, Android will be the worst, because everybody else (Apple, HP/Palm, Microsoft, RIM) has implemented at least some kind of consistent controls over what the hardware will look like.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Robert Knight, Robert Knight and AboutwebOS, AboutwebOS. AboutwebOS said: 2 million Angry Birds downloads on Android? Yeesh. http://bit.ly/cdiuAe #webOS [...]