It’s just that the tide of Android devices is going to be primarily composed of “free with contract” uglies, not the kind of cool phones that compete with the iPhone. (Which is not to downplay cool Android phones, which I suspect will get more competitive, not less.)

There’s plenty of prior evidence that design can come late to a company and still succeed, of course; there’s less evidence that design can come late to a platform and still win over that platform’s whole ecosystem.

So far, Amazon has not been great to developers. (Or book publishers, for that matter.) By most accounts, dealing with Amazon is actually much worse for developers than dealing with Apple. By putting your app in the Amazon Appstore, you’re giving up a lot more control than Apple asks of us: you’re giving up the ability to set your own price and control your app’s description, among many other restrictions. By comparison, it makes Apple look almost… open.

Even with all those reasons, I just can’t believe that there is still only one Android app that I can look at and say: “yes, that’s what I am talking about.”

Even if all the above reasons for not developing for Android are true, it would still seems highly unusual that I was only able to find one good app.

The best guess I have has to be that the “market share” is just not that high, thus not making it “worth” it for developers to make amazing apps for the platform.