I love reading success stories. I had an opportunity to read one such story yesterday, but let’s be clear, one developer making money on Android doesn’t make it a better platform than Apple’s iOS, nor does it mean the end of iOS.
[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]First of all, I’d like to congratulate Spacetime Studios for their success on both the iOS and Android platforms. Great to see a company find a niche and make money doing it.
The story yesterday about Spacetime was all about how it sells more apps on the Android Market than it does on Apple’s App Store. However, the success of this one developer is being portrayed like it’s a major shift in the market. It’s not.
Google is building its developer program and I wish them well doing it, but they have a lot of ground to make up before they catch Apple.
Android has about 150,000 apps in its store. Not a bad start, but hardly a threat.
Currently Apple has over 350,000 apps that have been downloaded over 10 billion times by its App Store users. That’s 10 billion.
Apple doesn’t promise developers all the riches in the world if they create an iOS app, but they do give the developers access to the largest, most enthusiastic group of users that are willing to buy high-quality apps.
So far, Apple has paid its developers over $2 billion for apps sold in its store. That’s a lot of money being spread around the developer community.
If success stories are your thing, let’s take a look at some for the App Store. How about Gameloft having 20 million paid iOS downloads or Outfit7’s talking-animal apps hitting 60 million downloads on App Store in six months.
There are plenty of other examples too. Cut The Rope sold 1 million copies in 10 days and of course, Angry Birds, which is somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million downloads now.
One developer’s success does not make Android a better or more mature platform than it really is.
Despite the fact that Apple developed the modern mobile App Store, the company will have some fierce competition in the future. It’s not a competition that I expect them to lose, but this isn’t a market where there will be too many losers.
People are going to choose their mobile device based on a lot of factors. User experience, operating system, availability of apps, integration, design of the smartphone and, I believe, the coolness of the products.
In my scorecard, Apple leads in all categories.
I really dislike the phrase “Apple has paid its developers over $2 billion for apps sold in its store.”
Apple didn’t pay them, they distributed to them the money they made. Apple helped them earn it but the money isn’t coming out of apple’s pockets. Heck it’s more accurate to say developers paid Apple 900 million to sell via the App Store.
yeah the apple app store market has been flooded with crap apps. android is trying not to sell out like the app store did by making sure the apps are actually good.
That’s fair.
What the dumbasd are you talking about cuz I did sure read that article and they where just pointing out the fact that even tough apples app store is more mature some developers are somehow able to make more money with the same app on the android market and based on the last statement its obviously writen by another apple fanboy
Haha, lol, have you seen the android market lately? Boy oh boy, even malware gets in there 😉
Are there spelling and grammar applications in the Android Market? You should really consider getting one. Perhaps all of them, just get all of them.
Rather, Apple is earning on behalf of developers because Apple is taking share of every sold application. This article seems quite biased towards Apple. As an independent writer, no body should tilt towards one corner. Apple is no doubt a successful company….but Google has changed the game now.
Hmmm, a little sloppy with the numbers.
Android market passed 200,000 apps back in December, and has steadily added 10K per month for almost a year.
Did I stroke out or did that make no sense?
Yes but how many of those apps are worth downloading?
The App Store not only has the quantity factor over the Android Market, but it also has quality.
Looking at the game developed by this one developer I wouldn’t bother downloading it because there are much better titles on the App Store to download.
When the developer of a big title on both platforms like Rovio who creates Angry Birds comes out with a statement like this then I’ll sit up and listen.
Okay, but let’s compare apples to apples. (Um, you know what I mean.) The iOS app store had 120,000 apps on January 5, 2010 and 400,000 apps in mid-January 2011. This is an average of 23K apps added per month.
“Wait,” somebody may say. “What about all those reports that the Android Market is growing six or seven times faster than the App Store?” They’re almost certainly correct. And the Nokia Ovi Store is growing nearly as fast as the Android Marketplace. We’d all better watch out! Or… maybe not. People tend to downplay the difference between percentages and absolute numbers. With the numbers above, the Android Marketplace is growing at three times the rate the iOS App Store is — but the percentages are misleading. If iOS keeps the same growth rate in terms of absolute units, they’ll have 675,000 applications in the store by the end of the year; for the Android Marketplace to pull even, they’ll need to be adding closer to 40K applications a month.
(I expect to see the iOS App Store actually slow down in terms of absolute units sold, but I also expect that as Android apps climb closer to the half-million point they’ll slow down as well. In any case, I’d be very surprised to see the Android Marketplace pull even before well into 2012. This is not a dig at Android’s viability, it’s a recognition that Apple has a serious, serious lead in this regard and there is no indication they’ve peaked.)
Where’s the difference? >.<
If you don’t count ringtones, wallpapers, soundscapes, the number of apps in the Android Marketplace is only 150,000. Also Androidlib counts apps that are no longer available.
In addition some 45% of apps in the Marketplace are spamware according to Appbrain so the real total of Android apps is even less.
-Mart
Indeed. We’ll need to see a lot more than one developer making money on Android before there is any real competition. These figures say it all:
*App Store Revenue 2009 – 2010* (source: IHS):
– 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.
*Advertising income per user* (source: Mobclix)
Mobclix’s Jan 2011 stats demonstrate that in the Advertising game, iPhone users are far more valuable than Android users.
In the Games category, the average iPhone user brought in more than double the advertising revenue per month compared to the average Android user, a third more income in the entertainment category and 30% more in the utilities category.
Even on Google’s home turf – advertising – iOS beats Android.
-Mart
Yes, “relative percentage growth” figures where you compare growth of Android as a percent of itself instead of relative to the competitor are a complete sham.
That “Android Market is growing six or seven times faster than the App Store” argument is meaningless as the growth rate will be a tiny fraction of that value next year as shown by the example of the known number of Apps on the Android Marketplace.
Android app “growth” rates for example have plummeted from the equivalent of 6,400% growth in 2008 to only 750% growth in 2010 and falling.
22 October 2008 0 apps
23 October 2008 50 apps Infinite growth
18 January 2009 800 apps 16x growth in 3 months (equivalent to 64x growth over 12 months)
16 December 2009 16,000 20x growth
31 December 2010 120,000 7.5x growth
(not counting ringtones, wallpapers or soundscapes)
You see this shows what a complete and utter bit of clap trap nonsense these growth rate figures are.
No-one in their right mind would assume Android will see a continuation of an 827% growth rate in 2011 or beyond. As an entity gets larger in a nascent market, percentage growth rates *always* drop and the plummeting graph of Android app percentage growth numbers proves that.
-Mart
“Android has about 150,000 apps in its store. Not a bad start, but hardly a threat.
Currently Apple has over 350,000 apps that have been downloaded over 10 billion times by its App Store users. That’s 10 billion.”
Where is the apples to apples comparison for the number of times an Android app has been downloaded. This article seems very one sided verses making an honest comparison. I find this to be completely useless in making any real decision. It would be nice is Apple would allow their phone to be used without jailbreak for more than AT&T and now Verizon. AT&T doesn’t work in many rural areas and Verizon just released the iphone 4 and will likely be delayed with the iphone 5 so it doesn’t seem like the best solution either.
What’s dishonest about these numbers? They’re both out of date now, as both stores are larger at last count. That it doesn’t have the “average number of times an app is downloaded” count doesn’t make it dishonest; one can argue that’s actually somewhat misleading, as in both stores there’s almost certainly a very small number of apps that account for the vast majority of downloads.
And at risk of getting snippy: look, Naomi, when you buy an Android-based phone in the US, you are actually buying a Motorola phone or a Samsung phone or an HTC phone and you are buying it from a specific carrier, and that specific carrier has locked the phone to their network. CDMA phones are essentially unlockable: if you buy a phone from Verizon, it is going to run on the Verizon network, period. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an iPhone 4 or a Droid X, it’s a Verizon phone. If you buy a Samsung Captivate from AT&T and you bought it with a contract, the fact that it’s an Android-based device doesn’t mean AT&T is going to help you unlock it. That’s what “contract” means. You can pay the full unsubsidized price and get it unlocked, sure–but you can do that with the iPhone, too.
Please tell me your joking… The android market has no restrictions and if full of pirated games and malware.
But it’s open and the apps are free and free apps are always better than paid apps.
Who cares that half of you screen is flooded with ads, it’s FREE.
LOL this is true 😉
I do care of my screen. I cant stand doing something while a crappy advertisement is using some space on my screen. Android market is flooded with crap apps and malwares!
Saleem, there is a huge difference between bias and factual research. Follow the money, the downloads, it all points to Apple.