‘Angry Birds’ Exec Calls Android Too Complex

Those who use the Android might wanna whip some “Angry Birds” out on Peter Vesterbacka, the head of business development in North America for Rovio.

While there’s a free version of “Angry Birds” for Android users available, a 99-cent version for the iPhone is a huge success. And the iPhone will continue to be “the No. 1 platform for a long time from a developer perspective.”

Question is: why? Apple has “gotten so many things right. And they know what they are doing and they call the shots.”

Android, too, is growing, he said, “But it’s also growing complexity at the same time.”

While there are many devices and carriers that use Android, “device fragmentation (is) not the issue,” Vesterbacka said, “but rather the fragmentation of the ecosystem. So many different shops, so many different models. The carriers messing with the experience again. Open but not really open, a very Google-centric ecosystem. And paid content just doesn’t work on Android.”

Vesterbacka’s remarks were made in a Q&A with Tech N’ Marketing, and reflect some other recent concerns about multiple carriers, handsets and how Android is deployed on them.

In November, “one of Netflix’s product managers confirmed what many have suspected for a long time: Android isn’t secure enough for the movie studios,” reported msnbc.com’s own Wilson Rothman. “Instead, Netflix will work directly with individual hardware makers to build Netflix apps for certain devices, a move that would rupture the already shaky notion that Android is a single platform.”

The ”real message,” Rothman wrote, is that “anyone looking at an Android tablet or phone should take into account: Because of the way Android is set up, its handsets will be increasingly fragmented, in a way that won’t happen with Apple’s iOS or Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, or even RIM’s BlackBerry, for that matter.” Rovio does not plan on making the Android version free since nobody, as of yet, has been able to successfully sell content on the Android. However, Vesterbacka stated. “We will offer a way to remove ads by paying for the app, but we don’t expect that to be a huge revenue stream.”

Lastly, when asked which model is better- he said: “Nobody else will be able to build what Apple has built, there just isn’t that kind of market power out there … That doesn’t mean that model is superior, it’s just important to understand that Apple is Apple and Google is Google. Different. And developers need to understand that. Different business models for different ecosystems.”