Google’s Android operating system is taking the entire world by storm as it pops up on more mobile devices every month. But Android is not at the top of the list when it comes to dollars spent on apps for mobile devices. A report by Piper Jaffray shows that the Android Market makes only 7 percent of what the Apple App Store brings on. That figure is based on the total gross revenue the Apple App Store brought in since it went live years ago.
The analyst for Piper Jaffray, Gene Munster, said, “In other words, it appears that Apple has roughly 85-90% market share in dollars spent on mobile applications, while Google has closed the gap in terms of app dollars spent over the last year and we continue to believe Android will grow smartphone share faster than Apple, we believe Apple is likely to maintain 70%+ share of mobile app dollars spent over the next 3-4 years.” Apple’s iOS platform is said to take in almost 90 percent of all dollars spent on mobile devices. This is good news to developers that create apps and want to monetize them on the iPad and iPhone devices.
The numbers that Piper Jaffray used in the study came right from information that was made public by Apple. Additional information was gathered from Androlib, which is an Android app discovery tool and it found that over $330 million was generated by the Android Market up to this point. That is a very high number considering only 1.3 percent of the apps are actually paid applications. Looking at the total number of apps downloaded being around 6.75 billion; the paid apps account for about 90 million downloads.
When it comes to selling prices for the apps, a typical Android app user will pay more for one app, but on the same token will not be downloading as many paid apps. Of the top 50 Android paid apps, the average price is about $3.80, which is almost $2 more when compared to the average price of $2.01 at the Apple App Store. The Apple App Store has generated over $5 billion in gross revenue to date and of all the apps in the App Store, only 13.5 percent of them are paid apps. The public data was only figured through September 30th for the Apple App Store.
