AAWP: What percentage of apps are incompatible with 512MB RAM devices?

Rafe Blandford from AllAboutSymbian and AllAboutWindowsPhone takes a look at what proportion of apps are actually incompatible with 512MB RAM devices.

http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/17975_What_apps_are_incompatible_wit.php

331 apps are not compatible with 512MB devices. Games make up the most of this category (65). Interestingly, 199 of the 331 apps come from two developers alone. Rafe says, “Excluding the results of these two developers would give an incompatibility percentage of just 0.088% (less than one in a thousand apps).”

An odd thing some have noticed through a ‘store hack‘ is that despite the 1GB RAM limit, games still played perfectly fine according to user reports on 512MB RAM devices. (Perhaps there’s some other long term performance limitation imposed by MS).

So it’s mainly games that might swing a user from putting in a little more for a 1GB RAM device – at least so they don’t have to wait for developers to optimise their games for 512MB.

The situation of specification based app incompatibility is an issue found in BlackBerry and Android devices too. In the case of Android, they do however counter that by having a greater number of available apps.

The vast majority of games are still compatible with the lower specification handsets, so it is important to emphasise that these devices are not a game free zone. For every 300 games available in the Windows Phone Store only one will be incompatible with 512MB RAM devices. However, the games that are incompatible do tend to be high profile. That’s not a surprise, given that such games tend to be more resource and graphics intensive, but it is something that a game-loving smartphone user should be aware of before making a purchase decision. 

App and game constraints on lower specification devices is not limited to Windows Phone. A similar story is to be found on both Android and Blackberry devices. Indeed Windows Phone, especially in the light of the statistics above, is a beacon of light by comparison to its competitors, with only a very small number of incompatible apps and games. In the case of Android, this is somewhat counter balanced by the great number of apps available, but, as we’ve discussed previously, it does reinforce the idea that, on a relative basis, Windows Phone provides a superior software experience on low cost devices

Cheers Alvester for the tip!

Category: Applications, Nokia, Windows Phone