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57% of Android apps are free -- iPhone apps: only 27%
57% of all Android Market apps are free, compared to 28% of the iPhone App Store and just 23% for the iPad. Only the Windows Marketplace has less free apps than the iPad -- but had anyone even heard of the Windows Marketplace before now? The Palm App Catalog is in second place with 34% free apps. No other smartphone platform gets above 30% (check out the damning graph above!)
As for an average paid app price, the results are equally interesting. BlackBerry App World, no doubt thanks to its large corporate clientele, lands at the top with a rather costly $6.97! Next is Windows Marketplace ($5.96), followed by iPad ($4.65) and iPhone ($4.01). Android apps averaged out at just $3.29 -- and if you want your apps under $3, the Nokia and Palm stores are your best bet!
But why is there such a disparity? TechCrunch, as usual, simply parrots the figures and pastes some pretty graphs. It's for two reasons, I think:
1) iPhone and iPad owners are paying the usual 'exclusivity' tax. It costs more to fix a Porsche than a Ford.
2) Android has a wildly different developer ecosystem and pathos. Android, by virtue of being an open source platform, will see a lot more open source apps. Openness breeds yet more openness!
Comments
32
Subscribe to commentsJayenkaiJul 6th 2010 8:54AM
A) Because Tom Dick and Harry are happy to pay for anything for their phone, whereas most Android users (so far, up to this point) know what they're doing, and are happy to spend 2 seconds hunting for a free version of "OMG! A FLASHLIGHT!!!!?!?!?".
PhandroidJul 6th 2010 10:59PM
Ah, the joys of uninformed Android users. Hey, wanna play Street Fighter 4 over bluetooth with me? Oh wait, you can't, Android. How about playing Plants Vs. Zombies? Oh wait, nope, not on Android either. I know! Let's play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater! Oh, oops! never gonna be on Android.
Android has a garbage "marketplace" garbage games, and mostly garbage apps. If you don't think so, you are completely delusional.
akiraJul 18th 2010 7:59PM
-want AR nav (wikitude drive ar)? oh wait apple doesn't let programmers do anything outside of their sandbox.
-want to be able to remotely track/wipe/backup/restore phone contents? oh wait apple doesn't let you do anything with your phone, they only just announced a similar feature but will cost you 100$ a year while there are several android versions available for free, totalitarian ftw.
-want to do anything on your phone, oh wait you have to connect it up to your pc and sync through bloatware itunes i'm surprised it only took what, 5 years? for apple to let you create playlists on your phone. for a device which is considered to be simply an mp3 player that can call people and it can't even make play lists, that's pretty sad. my 10 year old mp3 player can make play lists.
-want to video call people, oh wait you can only call other iphone 4 users and have to be connected to a wifi access point.
-want to pay an extra $1000 for the iphone 4 with 1 additional feature over the 3GS while the 3GS performs on par or better, done.
iFail.
mkoJul 6th 2010 9:09AM
Well the reason Ovi does not have many free apps in store beacuse you don't need to publish it Ovi Store. If you are a hobbyist you can just put it on your website.
Not to mention java apps
DaveJul 6th 2010 9:13AM
I cannot see any information to justify the comment "Not only does Android have significantly more free apps than either the iPhone or iPad".
The percentage of free apps is higher but the iphone market is probably much bigger. If I had a platform with just 4 apps and made 3 of them free I would get 75% free apps which is SIGNIFICANTLY more than either.
Sebastian AnthonyJul 6th 2010 9:17AM
Ah, that's true -- the App Store does have more apps in total than the Android Market!
It's probably not a huge difference now though -- App Store hit 100,000 at the end of last year, and Android hit 50,000 in April this year.
But yeah, agree, my wording is bad.
boisroJul 6th 2010 12:01PM
Actually, the Android Market has 85,000 apps, while the App Store has 225,000 apps.
I would be curious to see app category breakdowns and how those relate to price. For example, are the games roughly the same cost on both platforms, but the App Store developers charge more for the office apps?
sine909Jul 6th 2010 12:09PM
As of right now the Apple App Store has just over 226k apps (http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/). I believe it is roughly 4x the size of the Android store.
master811Jul 6th 2010 2:48PM
@sine909
Quantity doesn't mean quality. The Apple store may well have a lot more, but I'm sure it also has a lot more very crap apps too.
Abhi BeckertJul 6th 2010 10:53PM
If you're going to claim "iOS has more apps, but they're lower quality" you should at least attempt to back it up in some way.
Apple at least has some kind of minimum standard for quality before they'll accept an app, if it has any obvious bugs, or if it's confusing, then it won't be allowed in the store.
Android has no such system, it accepts all submissions which aren't malicious — and so it seems likely Android would have a higher percentage of crap software than iOS.
master811Jul 8th 2010 7:50PM
@Abhi Beckert
That's quite possibly true, but at the same time, means a lot of very useful apps (like other browsers, the ability to turn your phone into a wireless router , politically incorrect ones etc.) will get blocked simply because Apple 'doesn't like or want them' and so without a genuine reason. I'm sure there's plenty of other examples simply because Apple 'says so'.
ismaelzgmJul 6th 2010 10:02AM
Hmmm, half of those don't equal a 100%
Sebastian AnthonyJul 6th 2010 10:21AM
Nothing gets past you!
Apparently it's because of apps that started off as free or paid-for, but switched.
DiddleJul 8th 2010 1:02PM
Did you know that 78.4% of statistics are made up?!
@davey_ladJul 6th 2010 11:16AM
And the spin from Steve Jobs would be : "come and develop on our iOS... you'll make money"
DaveJul 6th 2010 12:05PM
Your reasoning doesn't make much sense to me.
How is the iPhone or iPad more "exclusive" than Android? The phones cost about the same amount and there are actually more iPhones than Android out there. In what world does a Porsche cost the same as a Ford and enjoys greater market share?
I think the more likely reason is iPhone apps have a higher startup cost. The iOS SDK costs $100 and the Android SDK is free. Therefore, obviously, if anyone wants to release an App on the Apple Store, they've already sunk $100 in it and therefore will want to charge something to get their money back.
The whole "exclusivity" reasoning makes no sense to me.
kenkyeeJul 7th 2010 8:36AM
The android market actually to requires a $ 25 google merchant account...so it's not free...
Don't understand why apps are cheaper on android though..smaller market should mean higher prices to recoup development costs....
PseudologicalJul 7th 2010 11:18AM
The iOS SDK is free. Membership to certain sections with provisioning is $100, but not for the SDK or the simulator.
idesignitJul 6th 2010 12:08PM
A quick search of the android marketplace on my droid for sowallpaper.com returns over 1,300 "apps" of um sexy wallpapers... and they are almost all free.... can someone put together a crap app/good app infographic?
DaveJul 6th 2010 12:15PM
I found that a big problem with the Android app store is that so many of the free apps are utter crap or involve apps of...question copyrighted material (eg: all the ringtone apps).
Also, the ranking system isn't very good and even a lot of the cross-platform apps with the iPhone aren't as good. For example, the Facebook app for the iPhone has way more functionality than the Facebook app for Android.
To be sure, the Apple app store also has a lot of, but I feel like there is a good system in place to make sure the cream rises to the top. That is something lacking in the Android app store.