Evernote’s Chief Technology Officer, Dave Engberg, recently gave a talk at the IGNITION Mobile conference. He offered the standard advice you always hear, that it’s better to use each mobile platform’s respective capabilities to their fullest extent than make a mediocre HTML5 website, but he also dropped a huge bombshell.
According to Engberg, Evernote makes more money, on average, from their Windows Phone users than from their Android users. That doesn’t mean Windows Phone is making more money for Evernote than Android, it just means that Windows Phones users are more willing to open up their wallets to access premium features.
While I’m not an Evernote user, I do have a personal anecdote to share. Back when I used to use an iPhone, I’d ask my iPhone owning friends what new apps they had discovered. They’d send me a link to an app or two and that would be that.
But now that I have an Android phone, people want to send me APK files. Think of them as Windows executable files. That’s full blown piracy. There’s no shame in it either, it’s seen as totally normal.
That actually explains a lot about the state of Android applications.