Thank you for your interest in OnSong for Android. Long story short, OnSong is currently an Apple-only app. This means that you will need to purchase an iPad, iPhone, or Mac computer to run OnSong. This is because OnSong is a full-featured app that has features that are not possible to provide on Android effectively. We are also a small team and want to place our focus on our current users and platform.
We have tried over the past few years to get OnSong developed for Android. Unfortunately, after working with three different firms we have not been able to create a product that we consider worthy of the OnSong badge. There are a few reasons behind this:
First, outsourcing an app as complex and robust as OnSong is simply not possible. The firms that we worked with could not develop the app with the amount of investment that we could offer them. OnSong for iOS/iPadOS has been under active development since 2010 and our focus has been to support the users who are using OnSong today. If we divert resources and time towards an Android version, it means the time that we don’t spend ensuring OnSong for iOS/iPadOS is the quality app that we demand and our users deserve. OnSong is a small company that works hard to keep our users first.
Creating an Android version would also require a huge investment. We have tried to Kickstart an Android version of OnSong, asking for approximately $30,000-40,000 USD to pay for professional development. The Kickstarter community raised a few thousand dollars which only paid for the rewards that we promised. Unfortunately, users did not support us enough to raise funds needed to develop the app from a financial perspective. We have also explored angel investment, but that requires that we take our hands off the product and leave decisions about it to those interested only in financial gain. By maintaining control over OnSong, we can ensure that we are looking out for the best interest of our users.
Third, 95% of OnSong users run it on a tablet. While Android has dominated market share for phones, it has not had the same level of success with tablet market share. But market share is a poor measure of a platform’s success. We have found that usage levels of Android tablets are very low and that most users prefer an Android tablet due to cost. If we were to develop an Android version of OnSong, it would not be able to perform on low-end tablets. With the price of iPad devices dropping, we believe that the market for Android devices used in a professional setting will continue to decline.
A fourth major concern is platform fragmentation. With OnSong, we are able to target newer versions of iOS/iPadOS because 95% of users are running the latest two versions of iOS/iPadOS. Android has a different story with less than half of users on the latest two versions. To complicate matters, each version of Android can also be customized by each manufacturer with different hardware configurations. This makes quality assurance for Android more difficult and time-consuming. Since OnSong is a performance-oriented app, we need to have certainty that OnSong will continue to perform in all scenarios.
We are continuing to grow OnSong and to solidify our current product so that we can move on to newer platforms. We are also continuing to be hopeful that through user-focused investment, we can hire rockstar developers who are passionate about music to build a ground-breaking app for other markets. Until then, we do not have plans to pursue Android development.