John Polacek

Chicago Web Developer

Engineering manager and frontend lead at Howl

My product recommendations at shop.howl.me

Shipping open source on Github

Follow me at @johnpolacek

10,000 Downloads

Originally published on 6/10/2011
Match the Letter has just passed 10,000 downloads in total. A big thanks to everyone who downloaded it (and especially those who gave it a good rating). Hope your kids are enjoying the game!

After 10K downloads of the game, something that stood out was small number of downloads for Android compared to iOS. Despite the large number of Android devices out there, it seems that most users just do not install apps. Perhaps, it is just not part of their mindset, and they are comfortable with the pre-installed apps. Maybe, the iTunes App Store is superior to Android Marketplace. Whatever the reason, with 93.8% of my downloads coming from Apple, I can see why developers are mostly sticking with iOS, and ignoring the Android Market. It is a shame because in many ways Google is more supportive of its developers than Apple, but ultimately it comes down to where the users (and money) are.

In spite of this, I dont have any plans on diving into Objective-C development. The Match the Letter game was me dipping my toe into native app development, and it was fun. However, for me, web app development is funner. I am currently wrapping up development on client project where I built a mobile web app/game for desktop and mobile. I think this is where the web is heading. Though it is not an easy process, using the front end HTML/CSS/JS stack is the best way to get content on the most platforms and devices. For my next project, I am going to go this route, deploying the app to the web for browsers and possibly use Phone Gap to create a native app.