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The race to 2012 is on
The App Genome project has measured a huge growth in the number of Android apps since August 2010
The App Genome Project is a survey by mobile security app business Lookout (they produce the rather good SmrtGuard iPhone/Android/BlackBerry/Windows app) and the latest figures culled from 500,000 users across the iOS and Android platforms in the US show a huge rise in Android app usage.
According to the project the Android Market outpaces Apple’s App Store with an increase of 127% since August 2010, while the Apple App Store grew at a relative rate of 44%. The consequence of this spectacular rise means that if each market continues to grow at the same rate, the Android Market will have more apps than the Apple App Store by mid-2012.
The Apple App Store is still in pole position in terms of total apps— with nearly 350k— and added 100k new apps in the past 6 months. However in comparison the Android Market has fewer apps, at nearly 90k, but has added nearly 50k in the last 6 months, more than doubling its size
The project also found that Android Market developers typically release more apps than Apple App Store developers, with an average of 6.2 apps per developer on the Android Market, compared to 4.8 apps per developer on the Apple App Store.
There also seems to be more paid Android apps than in previous times. Paid apps on the Android Market increased from 22% in August 2010 to 34% in February 2011, whereas the proportion of paid apps in the Apple App Store decreased slightly during the same period, going from 71% to 66%.
Android Market price points have also increased, with the proportion of paid Android Market apps costing $0.99 or less decreased from 61% in August 2010 to 37% in February 2011.
Will Android beat iOS? We think there’s a race but there are a lot of iOS developers out there, although if BlackBerry jumps in with Android things could change, and of course there’s HTML5 inching closer and closer, whatever happens it will be an interesting 12 months.
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