Chomp says Android Users Prefer to Search for “Free” Android Apps according to their Analytics Report

by Toni McQuilken Jun 2, 2011 4:36 PM – 1 Comment

Chomp released the latest report culled from the data it collects from search queries users run on its site. In this report, the data is from searches run between April 1-30, 2011. You can read our Android app review of Chomp.

Games, entertainment and utilities topped the charts for the most-downloaded app categories on Android, and while the top three are the same for iOS, utilities was far below the other two, percentage wise, for iOS, versus a much closer ratio on Android. What I found interesting about this is that games and entertainment were broken into separate categories – on Android, games account for 29 percent of all searches through Chomp, while entertainment accounts for 17 percent. On iOS, however, entertainment wins out with 23 percent, and games only gets 18 percent. This reversal says something interesting about how the different platforms are used.

: Most Popular Android Categories

: Most Popular iOS Categories

Probably the most interesting statistic from the report is that, of apps downloaded through Chomp, 97 percent were free, an increase of two percent from the previous month. This compares to iOS, which saw an increase of 3.8 percent in paid app downloads. However, it should be pointed out that paid apps on iOS only make up 17 percent of all downloads, which is more than on Android, but still a small overall percentage.

With baseball season starting, searches for the term “baseball” increased 72 percent over the previous months, with the highest peaks on opening day and shortly thereafter, showing that fans are actively searching for apps based on what is going on in the world around them.

Another interested statistic is that the term “free” is the most widely searched term worldwide on Android. However, for iOS, while the term still tops the charts in most countries, it wasn’t universal as it was in Android. In fact, according to Chomp, free was searched 20 percent more on Android worldwide than on iOS.

The full report can be downloaded here.

Tags: Android, Android Apps, Chomp, DroidAnalytics, Free Android Apps, Google, iOS, Statistics

Categorised in: Apps Blog, News

1 Comment

By ChrisLH on June 8, 2011 at 10:19 pm:

I honestly think that one of the primary reasons for this is that it is prohibitively difficult to make really good looking apps on Android. Apple has a huge advantage because UI/UX is a major component of Apple’s strategy and Apple devotes significant resources to making it relatively easy to incorporate high quality graphics and smooth animations. This adds a lot of polish and eye-candy to apps which makes people a lot more likely to feel like they are getting their money’s worth when paying a few bucks for an app.

Android is much more difficult to incorporate this type of polish, and no matter how good and functional an application is, if it doesn’t look good, if it doesn’t have that polish and eye-catching looks/animations, then people don’t feel like its worth paying for. So they want free apps.

I think as a community, its important for Android users and developers to begin to push Google to work towards making the overall user interface a priority. Even now, with phones which are much much more powerful than the iPhone, Android is laggy and choppy and the graphics and animations are very poor in comparison. This is due in large part to the emphasis Apple puts on this while Google does not appear to care at all about UI.

It really is engineers (Google) vs. designers (Apple) and while I love Android from a functionality standpoint, they could learn alot from Apple about making a smoother user experience.

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