Headlines blazed across the Internet this week that Google Play revenue grew by 67 percent, while Apple’s App Store only grew by 15 percent during the same time. Something about that seemed odd to me.
I’m no Horace Dediu, so please forgive my simplistic look at this, but when I looked at the stories, I realized that the research company didn’t actually provide any revenue numbers. How do they know the revenue from either company? It seems they are trying to work it out themselves, but that’s a guess at best.
Even Google will only say that “they’ve paid more money to developers this year already than all of last year.” They don’t provide any revenue at all, but say users have downloaded 50 billion apps.
Apple gives us some numbers to work with. At WWDC Apple said it paid $10 billion to developers since the App Store opened—$5 billion in the last year alone. Apple says it has 900,000 apps available and over 50 billion downloads from the App Store.
Since we don’t know how much Google has in revenue, 67 percent of thin air, doesn’t really mean a whole lot. Let’s assume that Apple’s growth is accurate1, 15 percent of billions of dollars seem pretty significant to me.
- Who knows what’s accurate with research companies these days. ↩
I am pretty sure the numbers are actually
from either ad companies or analytics companies
giving their revenue split between the platform.
That is all. Name of Apple is used to get clicks.
I have a paid & free game on both stores (iOS & Google Play)
iOS makes up 95% of my Paid downloads and 75% of my free downloads.
I’m only a small indie dev who does development as a hobby, and my numbers may mean very little in the grand scheme of things, but its safe to say my Android experiment is over and I will target iOS only in future, and avoid porting to Android.
“Who knows what’s accurate with research companies these days.”
…unless of course, it’s in Apple’s favor 😉
The issue here (and, please, correct me if I’m wrong) is that Distimo is most likely the same as App Annie and can only report accurate numbers for developers that have created accounts with them and given them access to their sales numbers from iTunes Connect and the Google Play developer portal. I’ve never heard of Distimo, so I can’t speak to the breakdown of developers on their own site. It would be next to impossible for them to know the actual lay of the land for either store unless they have a large enough percentage of both stores to gather accurate info.
They might just have a disproportionate number of top-grossing Android developers to top-grossing iOS developers using their site. I only use App Annie myself, which means that Distimo has no info at all on my company’s apps beyond their placement in Apple’s rankings, which only allows for rough estimates.
This is the same kind of jiggery pokery where the percentage of the mobile phone market “lost” by Apple is not presented with actual unit sales or the rate of growth of the market in question.
“Who knows what’s accurate with research companies these days.”
To me it sounds a bit like my response to Chitika: http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/07/23/ipad-hits-a-new-high-in-web-share-usage-samsung-hits-a-new-low/#comment-973625039.
I’ll reiterate and expand on it: consider the source and the breadth of data at their disposal.
tips hat
Always nice to meet a member of the The Old Guard.
How long did your experiment last, Crafty? And how many hours do you estimate you put into developing your game for each platform?
Unless, of course, the only metrics available in the first place are from Apple.
Was always on the lookout for the most powerful iMac that could still run OS9 so I could have a machine that would do nothing but run the Marathon trilogy. But now that I’ve rediscovered Aleph One I don’t have to worry about that. 🙂
This is from just under 4 months of sales stats (April to date) and actually covers two games (2 free and 2 paid) on both stores.
I used Corona SDK to build my app, so I didnt have to deal with native code (Objective-C & Java) and deploy cross platform easier. It took under 2 months to create the game, a week of that was porting/tweaking the finished product to Android.
I remember beta testing Aleph One’s Internet multiplayer back in college. I can’t believe it’s been 10 years.
I’ve got a Marathon marathon on my to-do list that I haven’t got around to, yet. I may have to do that soon…
Interesting. Thanks for the details.
I downloaded all three as a test last night and they ran brilliantly on my MacBook Pro. Of course any machine made in the last 5 years handily exceeds the base game requirements by 20 times…
CraftyDeano … Looks like u know a lot.. I am small game dev…I m working on a small game which i wissh to release soon… but i lack knowledge in the payment system here…… Could u please tell me whether google play pays to developers who publish apps for free…? or developers solely earn from ads and in-app purchaces only in case of free apps??