Android has a long way to go till it beats the iPad in the field of apps optimized for tablet use. Remember the time when you found a cool game and wanted to play it on your Android tablet? Well, it turns out that the game was oriented in portrait mode and you had to stretch it on the screen somehow… Now Google is urging developers to adapt to the tablet environment.
In a recent post on the Android Developer website, Google advised developers to build tablet-optimized apps, especially now that the holiday shopping season is coming. They also published a list of best practices for publishing the apps in the Google Play Store, plus 3 developer stories, success stories that is. They talk about devs who built really good apps that take advantage of a tablet’s large screen estate. The Android team also promised a future series of Google+ Hangouts and live YouTube broadcasts with tips on how to build better Android apps, for both phones and tablets.
Apple has now over 250k applications specifically built for the iPad, while Google declined to say just how many tablet-oriented applications it has for the iPad. They still brag about its ecosystem of apps, that are made to run on both tablets and phones. This is where the stretching happens and even big names like Twitter and Facebook suffer from this. Hopefully we’ll see an evolution this year…
