14 DAY TRIAL // Google's Android operating system should become a little more appealing in the near future, it appears, at least in the gaming area, as another leading game developer has just announced plans to come forth with a series of title for the platform, namely Electronic Arts. Electronic Arts CFO Eric Brown told the Deutsche Bank 2010 Technology Conference the company is considering making a move in this area, as the Android operating system is expected to enjoy impressive growth in the next few years.
“So I think there's a lot to happen in the future in Android, and we’re trying to position our mobile business to take advantage of that trend,” he said.
The mobile platform has already showed strong sales around the world, and is expected to become the second smartphone OS by 2014.
While Android would be on the second place on the market at that time, running on around 25 percent of handsets, the Apple iOS, another major player on the smartphone market, should be trailing it with 11 percent share.
Even so, both are seen as important change factors for the smartphone segment, especially when compared to older mobile operating systems.
“I think the next big positive way to push better growth in mobile will be the deployment of an App Store equivalent for the Android operating system,” CFO Eric Brown stated.
“We think long term ... the Android market is going to take its share,” he added.
In all fairness, this is not the first time we hear that Android would climb up to the top, nor the first time we learn that a major game publisher has issues with the Android Market.
Gameloft, another popular game publisher, has already come up with a series of titles for Android, but chose to distribute them via its own portal rather than having them submitted to Google's application store.
As a recent article on Gamasutra notes, other game developers show interest in the Android OS too, and they started to hire developers for that.
The mobile platform should also benefit from other solutions, including OpenFeint, id Software advertising and Unreal Engine 3, which make things even more interesting from an end-user's point of view.