Android Surpasses iOS in Free Apps

by Toni McQuilken Apr 27, 2011 1:45 PM – 2 Comments

In a report released today by Distimo, the Android Market surpassed Apple’s App Store in the number of available free applications. Android had 134,342, while iOS has 121,845. The report also states that, if the stores continue at their current pace, Google will have the overall largest app store marketplace in the next five to six months, followed by Apple.

Available Mobile Applications Report by Distimo

Overall, the app stores across all platforms had slowed down in growth, but that started to pick back up again in March, according to the report. Apple is the slowest is overall growth, although it remains the biggest for the moment.

For the full report, including the top ranked free and paid games across the various platforms, visit http://www.distimo.com/publications/

Tags: Android Apps, Android Surpasses iPhone, App Stores, Free Android Apps

Categorised in: Apps Blog, News

2 Comments

By Martin Hill on April 28, 2011 at 10:50 am:

Distimo is counting iPhone and iPad apps separately the beggars

You wouldn’t credit the gall of Distimo.

If you look closely at the labels of all of their graphs they have chopped up the iOS App store totals into separate iPhone and iPad categories and are comparing them separately against Android.

Considering that a very large percentage of iPad apps are universal meaning they work on iPhones and iPod touches as well as iPads, this separation makes absolutely no sense whatsoever – unless you are trying to artificially boost Android and get some sensationalist headlines.

If you count all iOS apps together, you find that the current number is about 430,000 (using DIstimo’s figures) and come July will = 475,000 which works out about 45% greater than Android at that time.

This also puts the number of free apps in the iOS App store significantly above the number of free apps in Android.

Shameless Distimo, shameless.

-Mart

Reply
By Martin Hill on April 28, 2011 at 10:51 am:

While Google allows anyone to post any spamware, broken bit of code or “hello world” app, the total number of apps in the Android marketplace is completely meaningless. An estimated 45% of apps in the Marketplace are spam apps and iOS boasts well over 300 top tier games from the premiere game publishers ID, EA, Gameloft, Popcap, ngmoco, Pangea while Android has between 20-30 for example.

The number of apps in the Amazon Appstore will be a much more useful comparison once that gets established thanks to Amazon ensuring that the chaff is weeded out.

However, far better metrics for the comparison of app stores is app download numbers, paid app income and advertising income which actually measure the real numerical and financial wealth and health of each ecosystem.

By those measures, iOS leads Android by an absolutely enormous amount:

*App Store Revenue 2009 – 2010* (source: IHS ScreenDigest):
- iOS App Store grew from $769 million to $1.782 billion = $1.013 billion increase
- Android Marketplace grew from $11 million to $102 million = $91 million increase
So annual Android developer income is a meagre 6% of iOS with an annual rate of increase only 9% as large as iOS. The gap between the two is 1,000% and getting far larger every year.
- Apple captured 82% of the revenue from all app stores in 2010 compared to 5% for Android

Now you may think that Android developers are instead making their money with advertising, but that is not the case:

- 71% of all app downloads were to iOS devices in 2010 according to ABI Research
- iOS users are worth up to twice as much as Android to advertisers according to Mobclix
- Millennium reports iOS captured 45% advertising income marketshare vs 38% share for Android in March 2011
- Net Applications reports iOS captured 3.3x the web browser share of Android in March 2011

-Mart

Reply