Selling a smartphone is one thing. Getting users to fill that smartphone with purchased apps and games, not to mention movies, music, books and TV shows, is quite another. Although no one disputes that there are more Android smartphones in the world, when it comes to after market monetization, the Apple App Store rules, period.
Earlier today, Apple announced iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users had snapped more than $10 billion worth of apps and games from the iOS App Store in 2013, including over $1 billion in December alone.
“We’d like to thank our customers for making 2013 the best year ever for the App Store,” said Eddy Cue, senior vice president, Internet Software and Services, Apple. “The lineup of apps for the holiday season was astonishing and we look forward to seeing what developers create in 2014.”
2013 saw surprise hits like Ellen DeGeneres’ Heads Up, ProtoGeo’s Moves, Simon Filip’s Afterlight and Kevin Ng’s Impossible Road. Many of the year’s biggest successes like Candy Crush Saga, Puzzles & Dragons, Minecraft, QuizUp and Clumsy Ninja were created by international developers, while Duolingo (US), Simogo (Sweden), Frogmind (UK), Plain Vanilla Corp (Iceland), Atypical Games (Romania), Lemonista (China), BASE (Japan) and Savage Interactive (Australia) emerged as developers to watch in 2014 — Apple
Of 2013’s $10 billion total revenues, developers took home 70 percent of that or about $7 billion. Since the iOS App Store launched in 2008, developers have been paid more than $15 billion — clearly, both app sales and developer payouts are accelerating.
App Store: Winning?
How does Android compare? Who knows. Google won’t say, which speaks volumes about how small those numbers must be.
So, while both Apple and Goole claim hundreds of thousands of available apps, the iOS App Store is the only one paying developers dollar figures worth reporting.
What of Windows Phone and Blackberry? Rounding errors compared to either Apple or Google.
That said, Google should forget any potential loss of face and announce how much they’ve paid developers listing on the Google Play app store — it’s gonna be in the billions, right?
Nevertheless, today belongs to Apple and the 15 billion reasons app developers love iOS more…
What’s your take?