The iPad Wins Because Android Tablet Apps Suck: An Illustrated Guide

I just gave the an Editors' Choice award for large tablets, but frankly it was a foregone conclusion. The iPad doesn't get the award because of its hardware, lovely as the hardware is. It gets the award because its apps are generally better than the apps available for Android tablets.

That's the conventional wisdom, at least. The assertion is hard to test, but I wanted to try. Comparing app availability is difficult. You can't just compare the number of apps available, especially when Google won't give a number for Android tablet apps.

So I assembled my own list of potential app providers. To create a list of top brands, I looked at Nielsen's top 10 global Web companies, online video destinations, and U.S. TV networks; Alexa's top 10 U.S. websites; the top 10 retail banks as measured by the Federal Reserve; 10 top online game publishing houses; Nielsen's top 20 Android apps by usage; and Apple's top 10 paid and top 10 free iPad apps by usage. I looked for official apps from each of these companies.

The First Problem: Finding Android Tablet Apps
Finding tablet-oriented apps for Android is a hunt, a chore, and a grind. You can find some by looking in the very small Suggested for Tablets area on Google Play, using search terms like "Tablet" or "HD" in Google Play, or using the Tablified Market third-party directory ($1.49).

Things get even worse when you realize Google Play shows different apps on its website and on individual tablets; even though the Google Play website claims some apps run on an , the apps didn't show up on Google Play on the Prime.

And just because an app claims to run on tablets doesn't mean it was designed for tablets. Often, after you download an app you'll discover that it's ugly or nearly useless because it was designed for a 4-inch screen. The frustrating discovery process is one reason our software desk was able to come up with a list of but only .

There's a slice of geeks who won't care, generally tech types who want to experiment and aren't afraid of some trial and error. They'll be rewarded with unique Android app categories like widgets, BitTorrent clients, and game emulators. But for the mainstream consumer, hunting down and puzzling out Android tablet apps is just too complex and frustrating.

Still, though, I wanted to collect a list of popular brands and see how they compared on the Transformer Prime versus the iPad.

Android vs. iOS: The Apps
Superficially, the picture doesn't look so bad for Android tablets; almost all of the brands are at least represented on Google Play, and some display more apps per brand on Android than on the iPad.

The problem is that the Android apps are often formatted for phones. They'll work on tablets - barely - but they'll be ugly, with less functionality than their iPad counterparts. Items that could be pop-down menus or swipeable content require screen reloads. Little information is displayed per page, for instance, on the eBay app. Graphics sometimes appear low-resolution, distorted (as on the CBS Sports Football app), or are overlapped by ads. The number of clicks to do things increases dramatically.

I was wrong to say about Android tablets, "competing tablets don't have apps." Rather, competing tablets have apps that usually suck. Not all of them suck. CNN's Android tablet app is gorgeous. But most of them do.

Android was weak on apps from TV brands, with only one app from ABC compared to the iPad's 12 and nine from Disney compared to the iPad's 32. But it did well with dominant Web brands, offering 14 Yahoo apps to the iPad's five and seven Amazon apps to the iPad's 4. There are 20 Google apps for the Transformer Prime and only eight for the iPad; Google+, most notably, is missing on the iPad. Google's tablet apps look great on both platforms. Apple, Nielsen's number-nine Web brand, offers no Android apps.

Each OS is missing some major brands. The iPad has no official Wikipedia app, although there are several third-party versions. The Android Wikipedia app looks so bad, though, that it's not really competition. It's a reformatted WAP site on a tablet capable of displaying the full Web.

There's no LinkedIn app on the iPad, but once again the Android app is uglier and less functional than LinkedIn's website. Apps are supposed to provide more or faster functionality than their corresponding Web sites, but those Android apps don't deliver.

It wasn't hard to find apps that ran on the iPad but not on the Prime. In my initial search Hulu+ came up, along with ABC and USA TV apps. All of those iPad apps look gorgeous.

The Android platform has all of the top 20 iPad apps except for the game Tiny Wings. The iPad lacks three of the top 20 Android apps: Advanced Task Killer, the Amazon Appstore, and Google+. But I'd assert that for categories other than games, Android tablets' problem isn't app availability but app quality.

Continue Reading: Android vs. iOS: Games and Geek Apps>

Android vs. iOS: Games and Geek Apps
Android games don't generally suck when played on Android tablets. There are just fewer of them.

To analyze the availability of games on Android versus the iPad, I looked at 10 of the top mobile game publishers as judged by Mark Fidelman of Technorati, with one swapped out: Gameloft, EA, Rovio, ngmoco, Digital Chocolate, Firemint, Glu, Hands-On, BigFish and Namco. I swapped Namco for PopGames, which I couldn't find in the stores because it's too common a search term. And I'm not counting Gameloft titles that aren't in Google Play, because most people don't know how to download those.

The iPad wins, 402 games to 176. Now, a lot of that seems to be Big Fish spewing 166 games into the iTunes store. 166 games! But even with that outlier out of the way, the iPad still wins 236-162. There are more major-label games available for the iPad.

Of course, there are entire categories of apps found on Android tablets but not on the iPad. Real alternate Web browsers. Widgets. Classic game emulators requiring illegally obtained ROMs. BitTorrent clients. Alternative app stores.

What all of those categories have in common, though, is that they're for tweakers. Geeks. Experts. The kinds of people who are likely to be reading this article, to be sure, but not the mainstream consumer.

In other words, an Android tablet might be better for you, reader, because you want to reinstall the OS and emulate a Super Nintendo. But that can't be a general recommendation if the apps from big, popular brands generally suck.

Why Android Apps Are Ugly
Way too many Android apps fall back on a design that looks like a late-20th-century WAP site: a stack of modules designed to look good on narrow screens. Unfortunately, that design is completely inappropriate for a tablet.

On the iPad, on the other hand, apps tend to use multiple panes or columns, which is a much better use of tablet real estate. This is actually a Google design recommendation for tablets. Developers just aren't doing it.

Android partisans argue that Google has given developers the tools to create great tablet apps, and devs aren't using them. They're right. Using a method called "fragments," the Android SDK is perfectly capable of creating multi-format apps that look ideal on differently sized screens.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here for developers and users. Apple solved it, in a way, by making the iPhone app experience on iPads so bad that developers had no choice but to code for the iPad. The iPad runs iPhone apps, but not in a way in which anyone would be proud.

Most Android apps have always been resolution-independent, though, so developers and publishers could fool themselves into thinking their apps run Just Fine. They run, of course, in the sense that the code executes and they (mostly) fill the screen. So the developers stop there, able to check their "we have an Android tablet app" box. But the apps suck. Of course, it doesn't help at all that the two most-popular Android tablets, the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, are small-screen devices running an older version of Android (2.3), which doesn't support the Fragment APIs necessary to create truly universal phone-and-tablet apps. The success of these two small tablets is actually holding back rather than advancing the cause of larger Android tablets.

For the slideshow below, I took screen shots of apps from top brands on an Asus Transformer Prime tablet running Android 4.0.3 and an iPad 2 running iOS 5.1. I tried to shoot the apps in landscape mode, but some of the Android apps forced portrait mode.

Yes, I know it's a slideshow. I know you hate slideshows. I can't think of any way to present this other than a slideshow. Go look at it. The captions are important.

The Sad Conclusion
The upcoming round of Android tablets is, hardware-wise, a match for the new iPad. The Asus Transformer TF700, for instance, has a slightly lower-resolution screen (at 1920-by-1200 compared to 2048-by-1536) but a faster, more powerful CPU in Nvidia's Tegra 3. The initial model of the TF700 will lack 4G, but will include expandable memory. It can trade specs with the new iPad blow for blow.

We'll continue to rate such high-quality tablets highly. But until applications from major brands come out in not only similar number, but similar quality for Android tablets, it'll be hard for one of them to beat the iPad to our top award.