WebProNews

At Search Marketing Expo East in New York, where WebProNews is on location, Michael Martin of Internet Marketing Inc. delivered a presentation about the growing Android market. He spoke about how Android is becoming an increasingly important mobile platform for marketers to keep in mind. In other words, it's not just about the iPhone.

Android is open and freely distributed, and it can be programmed in Java as well as C/C++ components. It can be coded on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can run multiple apps and have onscreen widgets. It can run Flash videos on updated versions, and it has forthcoming text to speech recognition with translations.

iPhones are massively popular, but Android devices are on the rise. There are over 40 different Android phones on the way over the course of the next six months (globally). Look at this graph from Flurry Analytics, which depicts new project starts between iPhone and Android.



Martin provided the following stats about why you should be thinking about Android:

- New Android apps are accelerating by more than 50% Month Over Month vs iPhone’s 30%

- Approximately 15,000 Apps in The Android Market plus other free "markets" – 64% FREE

- By 2010 an Android phone will be on every US carrier and most globally

-  Over 20 Android phone manufacturers including HTC, LG, Motorola, LG, Samsung, & Sony

He also listed the following benefits of the Android market:

- One Time $25 Registration Fee to submit unlimited apps

- No Submission Process (reviewed only by user complaints – approximately 1%)

- 24 Hour Buy & Try Return Policy

- Donut puts The Android Market interface on par w the App Store

- Paid Apps put on the forefront & sectionalized

- Soon to add PayPal, Credit Card & direct carrier billing w Checkout

- Listed in order of User Ratings

- Users regulate apps NOT Apple AT&T Google

- Google Voice – "There’s an app for that… on other phones" Jeff Sharkey Google Android Engineer

Android has apps for things like Facebook, Pandora, Quik, Ustream, Spotify, Twidroid (for Twitter), etc.
It's not hard to envision much more widespread adoption of Android devices as an alternative to the iPhone.

The point isn't that one is better than the other. The point is that both should be taken into consideration by marketers hoping to reach the widest mobile audience possible. It's like optimizing for Google and Bing. You may prefer one to the other, but you still want users to find you in both.