During Apple’s tenure they’ve provided us with great innovations and game changing products in the technology industry. Notably their first ever iPhone being released in 2007 became a real game changer in the smartphone market with numerous iPhone’s being developed and released soon after. Most significantly though the iPhone announcement birthed the release of the Apple Store which rivals the likes of Google Play and Android to be the leaders in the app market for their respective smartphone audiences. The question is, who is the real leader in the app market currently?
According to data that’s been released by Apadmi, despite Apple’s earlier release of the App Store in July 2008 compared to Google Play’s release in October 2008, overtime Google Play has built a bigger market for the variety of apps they have available in their Google Play store. As of 2017, Google Play held about 3.6m apps compared to Apple’s 2.1m apps and they also have far more first-time app installs with 64 billion compared to 28 billion for Apple.
Despite this, Apple still gained far more revenue from their mobile apps. Although they have less variety in terms of the apps available to download their revenue at the end of 2017 was almost double of what it was for Google Play and users are far more willing to spend their money in the App store then they are in the Google Play store with the average willing to spend just over $1 for their downloads. This shows that the audience for Apple are far more lucrative compared to Google Play Store audiences with much of the popularity being gained from gaming, entertainment and social media apps.
