iPhone users shell out more cash than Android users seem to. I think this is partially a function of the maturity of the platform. I'm including iTunes in this, which has been around for nearly a decade. I don't know about other countries but you can buy iTunes credit in every supermarket, petrol station and department store in Australia. That stuff matters. Compare it to the relatively high barrier of Google Checkout.
So yes iPhone users spend more but that's at least in part because Apple makes it easy to spend money in the iTunes ecosystem.
But iOS has one HUGE thing over Android when it comes to games: consistency of hardware. You cannot understate how important this is.
It's not simply a question of different resolutions but Android handsets have different chipsets, CPUs, amounts of memory, OpenGL support and so on.
Another massive advantage iOS has is... the iPod Touch. Lots of these have been sold? 100+ million? Lots of these are portable gaming consoles. This is something no other platform has. Parents don't often buy pre-teens phones but they will buy them iPods.
Windows Phone 7 might be able to replicate this ecosystem in time. They have the Zune and the Xbox (and Xbox Live) ecosystems available. But I believe that Android will either always struggle with this problem or will struggle with it for years, playing second fiddle to iOS as a gaming platform.
> I don't know about other countries but you can buy iTunes credit in every supermarket, petrol station and department store in Australia.
Very easy to find in western europe as well.
> Another massive advantage iOS has is... the iPod Touch. Lots of these have been sold? 100+ million?
That's total iOS devices (120 millions, announced by Apple in early september). Asymco[0]'s estimates are 45.2 million iPod Touch sold as of early september.
But yes, it is a very good point and one Gruber has wondered about a few times so far: neither Android nor WP7 have an equivalent of the Touch so far, and it is a major force for sales.
What Gruber misses is that the iPod touch is a freebie Apple gets thanks to the virtuous cycles they've created elsewhere in their business.
Apple has both an outstanding content channel and an instant payment mechanism. Selling content is easy. Which means they get great content to sell: music, movies, TV, and now, applications.
There's as much demand for content as for hardware in Apple land. Apple makes a killing on the hardware, gives most of the content revenue to partners, and everyone is happy. So you slip in an iPod touch, and boom: more content consumption, more hardware sold.
Without compelling content, who needs a non-phone Android device? Without an amazing instant payment mechanism, who wants to make great content for Android?
+1 On consistency of hardware, I know a few mobile devs that were around pre-iPhone and they rejoiced over the ease of development. Previously they were testing on 10, 20, 30+ handsets.
Wow, this is fascinating. ngmoco was founded only two years ago and it's already being sold for $400M. I wonder how it would have turned out if they didn't get iFunded.
The big hits (Angry Birds earning > $1 million per month, Ngmoco acquisition etc.) tend to be around the iPhone.