1.3 Million Android Apps in Google Play – here’s the breakdown of that

How many apps do you have on your smartphone right now? How many are android apps? How many are apple apps? In those apps, how many are free and how many are paid? Can you recall which app store have you downloaded most of those apps? Is it from Amazon Appstore, Google Play or from a third-party app store? Lastly, can you recall how many apps are you using each week?

Alright. Enough of these stupid questions. I’m just trying to warm you app for an insightful round of numbers crunching game. This will neither twist your brain nor cost you anything. Trust me. I will just share with you some important facts about apps. Just try to digest the numbers. Then at the end of this post, you may want to answer those stupid questions. Nahhh…are you kidding me?

Okay, let start.

How much does an average user pay for an app?

$5? $10? Nope. Zero! Yeah, that’s right. More than 90% of apps in Google Play and even on any other app store are free. According to Flurry Analytics, in 2013, the average app price in Google Play is $0.06. This means that you’re almost not paying anything for those Android apps in your smartphone.

Why most apps are free?

Good question. In real-life, no app developer will actually spend an average of 18 days to develop an iOS or Android app and just give it away for free. True it is in marketing that giving away free stuffs can increase sales. But after all, you still want to make money out of your main products. The same principle applies to software app selling. However, the business model is a bit different.

Apps are actually available in two forms: free (with ads) and paid (no ads). The price of getting paid apps ranges from $0.99 to $5.99. Free apps earn money from in-app advertising, in-app purchases and freemium subscription.

In 2013, according to Statistic Brain, 62% of Android app users never paid more than $1 for an app. I think I was one of them. How about you?

The truth is that most consumers hate ads on their screens. But when ask to choose between a $0.99 app with no ads and $0 app with ads, many will choose the latter.

How many apps are downloaded each year?

Even though this article is about Android apps, for numbers’ sake, let me tell you something about the worldwide apps market.

In 2013, according to Statista, about 102 billion mobile phone apps were downloaded worldwide.

According to Statistic Brain, about 62 billion of these 102 billion mobile apps were installed on iPhone (27 billion), Android (29 billion), Blackberry (2.4 billion) and Windows (4.1 billion) devices.

Here’s the most interesting figure that you have to crunch out.

How many apps does an average user download each year?

Still according to Statistic Brain, on the average, 68 Android apps were downloaded to just one Android phone (or equivalent to a single user). For iPhone, the average download per phone was 88. For Blackberry, the average was 49. For Windows phone, the average was 57.

Remember that the year was 2013. If you can still recall the apps you’re using about two years ago, then also try to figure out how many are they. More or less, it’s between 49 and 88.

What was the most downloaded app category in 2013?

Entertainment was second. Games was first.

Where consumers did downloaded the other 50 billion apps?

This time I can only speak for Android apps.

According to One Platform Foundation, there are about 36 Android app stores worldwide. Nine of them are in China, 1 in Russia, 4 in South Korea, 18 are operating worldwide and 4 are OEM app stores.

Here are the crunchy numbers the research group also shared with us. Aside from Google Play, these are the other app stores with high monthly Android apps downloads in 2013:

Tencent App Gems (300 million/mo.), HiAPK (290 million/mo.), Anzhi (180 million/mo.), AppChina (30 million/mo.), Opera (30 million/mo.), Amazon (25 million/mo.) and SlideME (15 million/mo.)

On my count, that would be around 10.5 billion Android apps in a year. Unaccounted numbers more or less were downloaded from 21 other app stores. Other apps come pre-installed on Android devices that were sold by 4 OEM stores - Amazon, NOOK, Lenovo and Samsung.

What do consumers do with their apps?

According to a 2013 survey released by Compuware, somewhere from 80% to 90% of all downloaded apps were used only once and then eventually deleted by users. Do you agree?

Hope that you find this post insightful.

#androidapps #android #Google