I just gave the new iPad 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 Asus Transformer Prime, 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 The 100 Best iPad Apps but only 12 great Android tablet apps.
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.