Apps in Canada: Android vs iOS

As I noted in an earlier post, for whatever reason Google has been relatively slow to move many of its media-related offerings outside of the U.S., and it appears this won’t change with the release of the new Nexus 7 tablet.

However, this got me thinking about another category of content: Apps. Presumably app developers have control over which countries their apps are distributed in, yet for whatever reason, international availability of Android apps is almost always more restricted — or at least delayed — than their iOS counterparts.

Two examples come to mind off the top of my head: Netflix and Starbucks.

Netflix was released for the iPad on April 3, 2010, basically in line with the release of the original iPad. An update on August 26, 2010 added iPhone and iPod touch support. At the time, the actual Netflix service was only available in the U.S., and so the initial release of the app was available only on the U.S. App Store.

On September 22, 2010, the Netflix service officially launched in Canada, and Netflix released its universal iOS app on the Canadian App Store at the same time.

An Android version of Netflix was released on May 12, 2011, but only for a very limited set of Android devices — specifically four HTC models and the Nexus S. This initial release was also U.S. only, despite both the Netflix service and iOS app having been available to Canadian users for almost eight months. It wasn’t until October 19, 2011 that the Android version of Netflix became available to Canadian users — over a year after the iOS app had debuted up here.

Starbucks released its first iPhone app on September 23, 2009; although the first release was U.S. only, Starbucks Canada appeared about six months later on Februrary 2, 2010. It would be over a year before the app appeared on Android at all — it was released for Android on June 14, 2011. However, to this day, the Starbucks Android app remains available in the U.S. only¹. On the other hand, not only is the iOS version available in Canada, but was expanded around the same time to add support for Starbucks’ Mobile Payment feature up here in the Great White North.

I’m not entirely clear on how the Android Market works (or “Google Play” as it’s called now), but I assume that developers have at least some say in which countries their apps are available in. If this is truly the case then the reasons for such limitations or delays on availability outside of the U.S. are not entirely clear. Some would suggest that this stems from a need to do a controlled rollout for scalability reasons, but I can’t see how this would really be a factor when you think about the number of iOS devices already in use. Google Play shows the current Starbucks app installed on between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Android devices; the App Store doesn’t provide such visible metrics for an app but it’s safe to assume that the number is probably higher, and I can’t imagine Canadian Android users pushing it so much higher that it would risk overloading Starbucks’ server infrastructure. Similarly, the Netflix app was already limited to so few Android devices that it seemed unreasonable that adding a handful of additional Canadian users would in any way represent an impact on the Netflix service in comparison to its availability on every single iPad, iPhone and iPod touch model in Canada.

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