Are there really no plans at all for an android app?

Please see previous forum posts.

Maybe we could get a new poll going to see how much interest there is in an Android app now that there are more Androids out there than iOS devices (in terms of sales at least)
http://softtalkblog.com/2012/06/07/android-takes-the-lead-in-smartphone-sales/
and various other stories just like it.

Market share is a terrible metric for sales potential, unfortunately - for most of the history of the smartphone market prior to 2008 or so, the dominant platform in terms of market share was Symbian, but hardly anybody made any money writing Symbian apps.

Virtually every cross-platform developer I've talked to has indicated that they make a lot more money on iOS; our Android sales at Pleco are about 1/3 of our iOS sales, in spite of the fact that the free Android app gets more downloads than the free iOS one (reflective perhaps of the larger number of devices) and that the Android app is a bit more up-to-date at the moment. Some of that is related to Apple's utter dominance of the tablet market, though - a third of our iOS sales are on iPads, while we sell scarcely any copies to Android tablet users. But that dominance is a real thing, and the enthusiasm for an iPad version in this forum suggests it's something that they need to consider as well.

It's still been worth the investment for us, and should be even more so when our new dictionaries (finally!) launch and we start selling a lot more stuff to old customers rather than just to new ones, but it's not a slam-dunk by any means, and it may be that Skritter would be better off investing their time in (say) migrating their website over to HTML5 so as to support Android / Windows Phone / inevitable-future-releases-of-Mac-OS-and-Windows-that-don't-support-Flash users in one go.

@mikelove, about selling to old customers. The absolutely brilliant integration of Pleco in to skritter IOS app made me and many with me to buy more dictionaries. I use Pleco much more often now due to this and went and bought all the dictionaries you had and will probably buy what ever more you get in the future. You can never have to many dictionaries:-) Thanks for an fantastic product!

Thanks! We're working on much more in-depth Skritter integration now, actually...

That's great about the Pleco/Skritter integration. Is there currently a way to add vocab so Skritter from Pleco?

Probably ought to put this discussion in a separate thread, but right now the only way to do it would be to export your flashcards to a text file, copy that to your computer (say by emailing it to yourself), and copy-and-paste text from it into Skritter's word adding form.

@mikelove - Actually I do just that but then copy the list contents by editing the export in Pleco, going into Skritter's app and then doing a "Quick Add" to the desired list - cuts out the need to use the computer or any transfers.

Ah, yes, that would be much faster - didn't realize they'd added it, my experience with the app was mostly back during the beta (I sent some feedback on the early ones plus spent some time with it when we were getting the initial Pleco integration working).

If there could be an "add to skritter" button when I look up a word that would be fantastic :)

@Nicki
Seconded! There's been a lot of interest in that feature, and from what I gather from previous posts, they're keen to do it. I'm not sure if its just a matter of time or if technical limitations are getting in the way.

A good HTML5 app would be a good solution for this problem.
Do it well and it can run smoothly in Android, iOS, Mozilla phone, Windows phone, and whatever.

Will be interesting how Nexus 7 does.

@Mikelove
So discounting iPad users who take 1/3 of your iOS sales, it would be rather even between iOS and Android?

For how long have you been selling iOS vs Android?

Just curious why iOS apps are so much better at being monetized versus Android apps.

@Catherine - little bit of both - we're busy and it's not easy - but we'd definitely like to do it.

@androidplease - that still means 2x as many sales on iOS at the moment, but aside from OCR we haven't added any new-features-you-have-to-pay-for to Pleco since 2008, so again we think that ratio may change once our big batch of new dictionaries launches.

iOS version has been out since December 2009, Android since January 2012 though we started selling a very usable beta in May 2011.

There have been many many discussions about why iOS apps make more money - leading theories include demographics (iOS users have more money to spend), consumer awareness (Android users often don't even know their phone is running Android or that it does anything but browse the web), user interface consistency, and the perceived quality of average Android versus iOS apps. Broadly speaking, it's easier to write code for Android because the combination of Java and Eclipse makes that process very streamlined / automated, but it's easier to make your interface look good on iOS: the built-in UI controls are attractive / easy-to-customize (even more so with iOS 5, though we're only just now getting to the point where apps can require it as a baseline), the UI is buttery-smooth without requiring any work on the developer's part, and there's much less hardware fragmentation to muck up your perfectly-designed icons / toolbars / buttons / etc. And the interface part seems to matter more in making users feel like an app is of high quality.

@MikeLove

Thank you,that's correct, I think many Android owners would had been iOS owners if their phones cost the same.

I was just thinking that the Android market had 3/9 with iOS having 6/9, out of which iPads takes a third, leaving iOS with 4/9 and iPad with 2/9 of the market.

Are there many iPod touch users?

Looking forward to the big update.

I was thinking maybe tablets such as Nexus 7 can bring in sales from a currently 'non-existing' segment of Android users as the Nexus 7 is designed to sell Google Play's content.

Too bad you haven't done a Skritter type feature in your app, but integration is a great idea. Bes of the best on each side

iPods are about 1/4 of the non-iPad total, so if you match Android devices against only iPhones and nothing else it's about 1.5x as many sales instead of 2x. That may actually be a more promising group to convert into Nexus 7 users than iPad owners, given that the prices are comparable, though we'll have to see whether Apple manages to outdo them with a 7" iPad.

A Skritter-like writing test in Pleco hasn't really been on our radar since Skritter decided to do a mobile app - there are so many other interesting features on our to-do list, many of them things that a) can really only be done by Pleco and/or b) have never been done before, that it seems kind of silly to spend our time on something that somebody else has already done beautifully.

@androidplease I think your math is a little off:

"Android sales at Pleco are about 1/3 of our iOS sales"

Android = N
iOS = 3N

"a third of our iOS sales are on iPads"

iPad = N
iPhone + iPod = 2N

"iPods are about 1/4 of the non-iPad total"

iPod = 0.5N
iPhone = 1.5N

I think it is interesting that there are more Android downloads than iOS, which suggests to me that the reason for Pleco's higher iOS sales is more down to the "demographics" story rather than "consumer awareness". I would guess higher end Android devices represent proportionally more sales than low end.

sorry, read it as one third of total sales not of ios sales.

what new features will Pleco get. how much will they cost?

@alanmd - Higher end Android devices are indeed a larger portion of our paying customers on Android, yes. Actually even just in general we seem to be attracting a higher-end clientele than Android as a whole - the rate of adoption of the newest version of Android (4.0/4.1) is significantly higher among our customers than among all Android users.

@Androidplease - Haven't announced pricing or the full list of new features yet - user interface and search overhaul are two big free improvements but we've also got a whole bunch of new dictionaries on tap.

brilliant, can't wait! really getting curious what the unannounced features will be. guess the new improved hand recognition will come at cost as I understand it comes with licensing fees for Pleco, is that correct?

Well there's nothing *too* unexpected - some of the dictionaries are quite spectacular, but there aren't going to be any giant new non-dictionary features like OCR. Only planned non-dictionary paid add-on at the moment is synthetic text-to-speech, for reading sentences / documents / etc out loud.

Improved handwriting will almost certainly be a free upgrade on iOS, but we haven't made up our minds about it on Android yet.

Is it possible to save the text to voice speech to a mp3 file to be played on the PC?

Looking forward to the dictionaries. Is it the Oxford one, or something similar?

Sadly no, every license agreement we've ever seen for a speech synthesis system includes very explicit language forbidding you from doing that; otherwise someone could output audio for (say) every entry in a dictionary and use those without paying royalties to the people who made the speech synthesizer.

Oxford is a "maybe," but more broadly, we've already got a lot of general-purpose C-E/E-C dictionaries and hence we're now expanding a bit into other categories.

Thank you. Any additional beginners' dictionaries?

Will the text-to-speech adopt to the tone-sandhi?

Expanded version of Tuttle is one of the new dictionaries, but nothing else beginner-y at the moment - there are a ton of them out there but relatively few of good quality.

TTS does use tone sandhi properly, yes.

@Mikelove

Thank you for the info. Now there is just the waiting game.

Interestingly, I keep coming back here looking for an Android app, but won't be buying until one exists. I use Pleco a lot on the train on the way home and there just is not enough connectivity to make an online version of anything work. This is pretty much the case anywhere at the moment so a service I can only use at home is useless to me.