If you are interested in joining our mailing list, please submit your email below. Research by Research2guidance has revealed that the Android market is growing faster than iPhone and it would be almost catching up with IOS if it wasn’t for those pesky App store owners.
The Research2guidance (R2G) research shows that while there are tens of thousands of new Android apps appearing, there are an equally significant number of apps disappearing in regular purges.
In Q3 of 2011, the number of active mobile applications in the Android Market stood at 319,161 compared to 459,589 in Apple App store. However R2G believe that the Android market is bigger than it looks. Delving deeper R2G found that Android developers are significantly more productive than Apple’s. The average publisher on Android has placed more than 6 applications in the Market since launch, compared to just over 4 apps on average that have been published by iOS developers.
The actual total number of applications published on the Android Market leapt to over 500,000 in September 2011. In the meantime, the Apple App Store stands at just over 600,000 successful submissions: just 20% more. The issue is that over 37% of the applications published were later removed from the Android Market for various reasons, whereas the Apple App Store has removed just 24% of published apps in comparison, as of the end of September.
Although Apple is known to regularly clean up its store from inappropriate or outdated content, its active application share still exceeds that of Android. It is likely that the more rigid application submission requirements prevent developers from publishing multiple trial or low quality applications whereas publishers in the Android Market place a lot of market testing, trials, and demos. Over 78% of the apps removed from the Android Market were free, which could mean that publishers put more effort into the applications they place with the pay-per-download business model, thus ensuring that it is kept longer in store.
R2G also have some interesting figures about the Windows Phone 7 market. The share of deactivated apps in the WP7 Marketplace today stands at just 13%. However, one has to bear in mind that it is a comparably young store and many publishers are still exploring its potential. Fifteen months after its launch (comparable to the WP7 store now), the Android Market similarly had 86% of its apps active and a significant application store clean-up didn’t get started until the end of 2010.
