Android Tablets Are a Scam. Here’s Why They’ll Never Improve.

You bought an Android tablet because you refused to pay the Apple tax. Or because you wanted freedom. Or maybe because the specs looked incredible on paper. And then you opened an app, and it stretched like a bad Instagram story. You tapped a button, and the keyboard covered half the screen. You tried to multitask, and the system laughed at you.

The frustration is real. But it’s not Google’s fault. It’s not the hardware. It’s something much uglier: a market failure so deep that no single company can fix it.

Let me walk you through why Android tablets will never, ever have a decent app ecosystem – and why the people who blame either Google or the hardware makers are missing the point entirely.

The most common take you’ll hear is that Google abandoned tablet-optimized software after Android 3.0 (a disaster they’ve all agreed to pretend never happened). And sure, that didn’t help. But the real problem is a ruthless economic trap that locks every player into doing nothing.

Here’s the math: To build a proper tablet app, a developer has to rewrite the entire UI for landscape mode, add split-screen support, handle stylus and keyboard inputs, and test across a dozen different screen sizes and aspect ratios. The cost? Easily hundreds of thousands of dollars per app. The reward? Near zero. Android tablet users don’t pay for apps. Their ad revenue is pathetic. And the audience is tiny – iPad alone owns over 50% of the global tablet market and captures almost all the premium users who actually spend money.

So developers ask themselves: Why would I spend money to serve a population that barely exists and doesn’t pay? They don’t. They punt. The apps stay as stretched phone versions, and users blame the tablets.

But here’s the part that nobody talks about – the part that makes this problem truly unsolvable.

Android is open source. That superpower became a curse. When one manufacturer – call it Company X – pays to get WeChat or TikTok adapted for tablets, that adaptation works on every Android tablet from every brand. Competitors get the benefit for free. They can lower their prices, flood the market, and steal sales from Company X, who just burned millions for the industry’s good. That’s called the free-rider problem. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons.

Smart companies understand this. So they do the rational thing: nothing. They wait for someone else to blink. And since everyone is waiting, nobody moves. That’s the Nash equilibrium of Android tablets – a stable state where no player can improve their position by acting alone, so everyone chooses inaction.

Samsung tried funding HD apps years ago. Huawei poured billions into ‘平行视界’ (parallel vision). Others followed. Each time, the early mover got burned. The money flowed, the ecosystem improved for all, and then the competitors undercut them on price using that same improved ecosystem. The lesson was learned: investing in Android tablet software is a subsidy for your rivals.

So the industry settled into a collective shrug. And that shrug is permanent.

Today, the only companies still making Android tablets are those using them as IoT glue – a way to keep you in their smart home ecosystem – or chasing short-term fads like online classes and light office work. Media consumption only. No productivity ambitions. No app quality push. They update hardware annually, patch the software lazily, and call it a day.

The one player with enough scale and long-term vision to break the cycle? Huawei. But Huawei no longer makes Android devices. Blame geopolitics, blame anyone you want. The point is: the potential leader is gone.

So who’s left? Xiaomi is the top Android tablet maker in China right now. Do they look like the company that will single-handedly fund a tablet app revolution? No. Honor is busy not running back to Huawei. Lenovo? Please.

This isn’t a technical problem. It’s a collective action problem. And until someone with insane market share and even more insane patience decides to take a loss for the greater good, nothing will change.

Your Android tablet is a giant phone. Treat it like one. Watch videos. Read novels. Use it as a coaster. But stop hoping for it to become a productivity machine. That hope is the one thing the market will never deliver.