Google’s Android app store Google Play is growing at a rate of 43pc in the 20 largest countries, compared with a rate of 21pc for the Apple App Store. However, daily revenues in the Apple App Store are up to five times higher than those of Google Play.
According to the latest report from Distimo, Google Play showed tremendous growth during the past four months, with an aggregated growth in daily revenue of 43pc across 20 of the largest countries, while the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad grew by 21pc in daily revenue in the same period.
Even though the growth in revenues in Google Play in the last four months is close to that of the Apple App Store in 2012, the growth in daily revenues in the Apple App Store was higher than the total daily revenues in Google Play when comparing absolute daily revenue values.
“Draw Something, one of the best known apps of 2012, reached 1n users in 9 days, however we’ve found it is possible to gain 1M users even faster. Naver, one of the most successful Asian publishers, launched five applications at the end of November 2012, and all five quickly became the most popular applications in many Asian countries. We estimated Line Pop, the most popular of the five, generated 1.75M downloads within 72 hours,” the Distimo report said.
The App Store opportunity
Looking at the worldwide download volumes, the app store opportunity is large. On a typical day in November 2012, the revenues in the Apple App Store exceeded US$15m, while in Google Play the revenues are just below US$3.5m in 20 of the largest countries in both app stores.
Seven applications were responsible for 10pc of the revenues in November 2012 in the Apple App Store for iPhone, which is significantly lower number of applications than in January 2012.
In the Apple App Store for iPad, six applications were responsible for 10pc of the revenues, while in Google Play this figure was four.
The country with the highest tablet download proclivity is Russia, where 46pc of all iOS downloads are on the iPad.
Other countries with a high proclivity of iPad downloads are The Netherlands and Finland with 38pc and 35pc, respectively. Japan is the country with the least tablet download proclivity, as only 7pc of all iOS downloads are iPad apps.
The iPad revenues are already higher than the iPhone revenues in some countries such as Russia when looking at revenues.
The proportion of revenue that derived from in-apps increased from 53pc to 69pc in 2012. However, in 2012 there were still some publishers who were very successful with a paid-only strategy. Moreover, 35pc of the revenue from the top 10 publishers was derived from one-off fees in 2012.
Apps market image via Shutterstock
