Research2guidance has published its Android Market report for the month of April 2011 that gives us a brief insight on the Android platform. Android has enjoyed a great run in the global mobile arena and is not slowing down. Lets take a quick look at the report and see where the Android platform is headed as per predictions of the report.
A brief history of Android:
Android is the fastest growing app store today. Many recent studies and reports have confirmed this by studying month on month as well as year on year growth.
Even though the Android Market was slow to start off when it was launched, the Android Market has done better than Apple’s Appstore since October 2010 in terms of new application uploads. The growth of the Android Market is so phenomenal that if it maintains the current rate of growth, it will overtake the Apple Appstore within the next 3-4 months.
The Current state of the Android Market:
- At the end of April 2011, Android Market featured 294,738 apps of which about 188,000 are free apps. This means only 36% of all the content on the Android Market is paid while the rest is free.
- This makes Android Market the biggest platform for free apps. This is in stark contrast to other app stores where around 60% of the content is paid. That being said, the share of paid apps varies greatly among categories.
- Paid apps account for only 11% in ‘News & Magazines’ where as ‘Personalization’ content features over 77% paid apps. The paid content totals around 40% in the month of April 2011.
- The average selling price of apps increased by 2% to $3.23 USD. The difference in categories too remained high with personalization apps going for around $1.31 USD where as ‘Medical’ apps sold for an average of $19.00 USD.
- In the month of April alone 28,000 applications were added to the Android Market, compared to 11,000 added to Apple’s Appstore, another stat that highlights the growth of Android Market.
Top categories by number of apps:
Entertainment continues to be the number one category in terms of number of applications, however the number of games submitted was more than the number of entertainment apps that were submitted during April 2011. If the current trend continues then Games will overtake Entertainment as the no.1 category within the next 13 weeks.
Google at (Google I/O) announced that the Android Market had reached 4.5 billion downloads. The last billion downloads took just about 60 days to come. Google also revealed that it was seeing an average of 400,000 Android devices activated everyday!
The momentum is strong but with developers complaining about fragmentation on the Android platform, Google needs to put these concerns to rest. If Google manages to do that then it will be hard to stop Android from becoming the leading mobile platform in the world.
Will fragmentation halt the growth or is Google up to the challenge? What is your take?
Download the report here: http://www.research2guidance.com/shop/index.php/android-market-insights-april-2011.