The battle for mobile platform dominance between Android and iOS is fought every day on the internet, and there’s always a common theme.
Android dominates all other mobile platforms in terms of sheer user numbers, and Apple makes the vast majority of the profits. This trend has existed for several years, and 2015 saw the gap grow even more.
A report looking back on 2015 from analytics firm App Annie tracks app downloads on the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, and several trends are clear.
First, Android’s user base is growing quickly, and those new users are downloading almost twice as many apps per year as they did in 2013.
Annual Worldwide App Downloads
Conversely, Apple’s App Store didn’t see growth in downloads, instead showing a slight decrease from 2014.
Android users actually downloaded 100 percent more apps than iOS users in 2015. Download numbers, however, don’t tell the whole story, as evidenced by looking at overall revenue in each of the two app stores.
Annual Worldwide App Revenue
While revenue grew moderately on the Google Play Store in 2014, sales on the iOS App Store kept pace with gains from previous years, bringing Apple developers more than 75 percent more revenue overall than Google’s in 2015.
Some of the regions helping Android’s gains in user download numbers were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Mexico, while Apple’s app revenue grew particularly in China, Japan and the US. As with last year, games provided 75 percent of revenue in the iOS App Store, and 90 percent of revenue for Google Play.
[source]App Annie[/source][via]VentureBeat[/via]
