Comics UK

Brand new anthology adventure comic on the ipad now:
http://downthetubes.net/?p=15045

Once again, how good to see new British comics coming out. BUT, the dreaded words, "for I-pad", appear. No mention of android and if they are daft enough to preclude the millions of android users, their business sense is a bit lacking. I would love to have this new title to read on my android tablet, but I am certain I am not going to go through Apple to do so. Give us an android app and realise the potential of a major platform, please.

paw broon wrote:Once again, how good to see new British comics coming out. BUT, the dreaded words, "for I-pad", appear. No mention of android and if they are daft enough to preclude the millions of android users, their business sense is a bit lacking. I would love to have this new title to read on my android tablet, but I am certain I am not going to go through Apple to do so. Give us an android app and realise the potential of a major platform, please.

I'm not a developer, but I can see a number of reasons why a lot of titles are developed on the iPad/iPhone; apps on the iTunes store are harder to pirate, there isn't a plethora of hardware to develop for and iPad owners generally have more disposable income. Worse - it isn't just a case of porting an app over to Android, they are fundamentally different formats, and usually require a doubling of development teams and most costs unless the app is developed in a multi-platform environment, such as Corona (this is becoming more common). So it's probably prudent for a company to wait and see if the iPad version makes a splash before committing to Android...

Interestingly, android sales throughout the world, vastly outnumber Apple sales. But perhaps the main reason for having an apple app is that it is easier to monetise the users. Android has by far the largest selection of free apps.
Completely non-scientific, I compared android users to apple users in a few different group of friends and one in particular has a preponderence of people interested in comics to some extent. Only 1 of them uses an I Pad, the rest use various makes of tablet running android. (One reason being, you can add lots of storage to a Samsung, for instance, and don't have to rely on cloud based storage) Other groups do not have so many comic interested folk but, even there, I noticed a number of android phones. None of them Chinese but with Chinese manufacturers rushing out millions of new devices which are on the android platform, that is only going to skew world sales even further awa y from Apple.
None of this gets me and and a potentially big audience any closer to reading this new title on our android devices. Despite paying the same price for the comic, android users wont generate as much side income through an android app as Apple users will.

If you look at the ROK Comics site you'll see that some of their titles are available for Android, so perhaps Pulse will be eventually.

Lew Stringer wrote:If you look at the ROK Comics site you'll see that some of their titles are available for Android, so perhaps Pulse will be eventually.

I think I said this before, I don't like reading comics on screen, but this and Aces, and the revived DCT character appearing on-line, is a great development, and I know I will read them once I get a suitable device. Things change, the comics we knew as kids will never come back in the same way as comics from the forties and thirties wont make a return, digital is the way forward. If they could do a print on demand version too, that would be nice, but I understand that some of Aces material involves motions comics, (I may be wrong) hard to print that!

David

I don't know, David. Maybe there are untapped, alternative ways to fund new print comics in Blighty. One way might be for prospective publishers to go hard at licensing, movie options etc, whereby the comics- whilst being the creators' first love, could also serve as ongoing 'brand awareness'- legitimizing their funding in the eyes of their backers.

A lot of people loved the Dredd movie, but I think it was in many ways a missed opportunity, the foregoing of a fantasy element like the Dark Judges maybe being a cause for its underperformance at the box office, and by turns few new readers of 2000AD.