Even Android’s Top Developers See a Scant Number of Paid Downloads in US
It’s no secret that the Android Marketplace’s payments flow and Google’s lack of credit card data make the platform challenging for developers to monetize on relative to Apple’s iOS. Even Android’s very top developers — including ones that ship in excess of 2.5 million apps per month in the U.S. — are seeing few paid downloads, according to data provided to us by research firm Xyologic.
Electronic Arts’ holiday sale pushed two of its apps, The Need for Speed Shift and The Sims 3, to the top of the paid charts after the company cut prices to $0.99. Those two top slots produced 110,600 apps in estimated U.S. sales, or about $77,000 in sales after the store’s 30 percent cut.
Companies that pursue the free-to-play model and use free apps to promote paid versions also had trouble convincing users to pay. Of all app downloads, 98.4 percent of them were free on Android compared to 91.8 percent on the iPhone in December. Traditionally, free apps have been around roughly 80 percent of all downloads on the iPhone. But as the free-to-play model has taken off in the last three months, this share has risen.
Magma Mobile, a fourth-ranked developer which produced an estimated 4.9 million U.S. downloads from Dec. 8 to Jan. 8, saw 800 downloads of its paid apps during that time, according to the firm. Outfit7, which recently surpassed 60 million all-time global downloads for all platforms, saw 39,100 U.S. downloads of its paid apps. That was in spite of seeing roughly 2.8 million U.S. downloads on Android.
Android has yet to catch up to Apple’s fluid and simple iTunes payment flow. While the platform recently signed up T-Mobile and AT&T to support carrier billing for apps, the platform still lacks the two other major carriers and developers are still awaiting an in-app purchase solution. On top of that users aren’t prompted to add their credit cards until they try to purchase a paid app. On iOS, you have to produce a credit card number from day one.
Payments are a weakness competitors like Amazon and partners like Verizon are capitalizing on through the creation of their Android app stores. Angry Birds developer Rovio Mobile even announced its own payment solution for Android last month called Bad Piggy Bank — created out of its frustration with purchasing on the platform.
Other top developers have told us they’re primarily relying on advertising instead and are hoping that Android’s growth, with 300,000 device activations a day, will compensate for the platform’s shortfalls in payments. Google has also pledged to come out with an in-app purchase solution in the near future.
Data on downloads and sales for Android has been extraordinarily hard to come by. Xyologic created its estimates by tracking the app store directory, building statistical models and through discussions with top developers and third-party services. This data is only for the U.S. (although the firm collects data on more than two dozen other markets). The company’s chief executive Matthaus Krzykowski is moderating a panel on monetizing mobile and social gaming today at InsideSocialApps, our conference for developers.
Top Android Developers in the U.S. (December 2010)
| Developer | Total Downloads | Free Downloads | Paid Downloads | Total Number of Published Apps | Number of Free Apps | Number of Paid Apps | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Rovio Mobile Ltd. | 6,431,000 | 6,431,000 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 2. | Pandora | 5,680,000 | 5,680,000 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 3. | 5,170,000 | 5,170,000 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | |
| 4. | Magma Mobile | 4,859,000 | 4,858,000 | 800 | 29 | 26 | 3 |
| 5. | Com2uS | 3,724,000 | 3,711,000 | 12,700 | 9 | 4 | 5 |
| 6. | Videotones | 3,166,000 | 3,166,000 | 0 | 335 | 335 | 0 |
| 7. | Outfit7 Ltd. | 2,873,000 | 2,834,000 | 39,100 | 9 | 3 | 6 |
| 8. | Adobe Systems | 2,136,000 | 2,136,000 | 0 | 8 | 8 | 0 |
| 9. | Yahoo! Inc. | 2,043,000 | 2,043,000 | 0 | 15 | 15 | 0 |
| 10. | Clear Channel Radio Digital | 1,840,000 | 1,840,000 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 11. | Handcent | 1,671,000 | 1,671,000 | 0 | 8 | 8 | 0 |
| 12. | movie music | 1,413,000 | 1,413,000 | 0 | 8 | 8 | 0 |
| 13. | MP3 Music Download Team | 1,194,000 | 1,194,000 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 14. | Storm8 | 1,106,000 | 1,106,000 | 0 | 12 | 12 | 0 |
| 15. | Backflip Studios Inc. | 1,051,000 | 1,051,000 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
Top Android Paid Apps in the U.S. (December 2010)
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*New means new to the Top 150 apps in that month
January 27th, 2011 at 6:25 pm
[...] poised to become a platform of equal or even higher priority for developers than Apple’s iOS, it isn’t as lucrative because of poor payments infrastructure. It’s also difficult to grapple with fragmentation, a consequence of Android’s [...]
February 1st, 2011 at 12:24 pm
[...] comes at a time when in app purchases have grown rapidly on iOS. About 91.8 percent of iOS app downloads were free in December, up from around 80 percent three months ear…, according to research firm Xyologic. Third-party offers providers like Adknowledge have also moved [...]
February 5th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
[...] App Store, while hardly perfect, is far superior to Android’s for finding and purchasing new apps. Android needs to figure out a way to organize its apps and [...]
February 9th, 2011 at 7:30 am
[...] 苹果的App Store虽然算不上完美，但在发现和购买新应用方面已经远远优于Android的电子市场。Android需要找出一个方法来组织它的应用程序，并简化支付过程。2011年一定会找到解决办法，可能是Google，它已经宣布了更新计划，但也可能是第三方Android应用商店，例如Amazon。 [...]
February 15th, 2011 at 12:21 pm
[...] Android stats are also from the holiday season December 2010, while the stats for Windows phone 7 is from January [...]
March 22nd, 2011 at 11:51 am
[...] Amazon’s entry into app store sales today promises to deliver what Google hasn’t been able to so far — real paid downloads and in-app payments for Android developers. [...]
March 29th, 2011 at 6:46 pm
[...] prowess at payments. Even though developers have offered paid apps on the platform, the number of paid downloads on the platform has paled in comparison to volume seen on iOS. Google doesn’t require that consumers register their credit card when they activate their [...]
April 13th, 2011 at 12:09 pm
[...] developers have seen a scant number of paid app downloads in part because the platform’s payments experience is clunky and the company lacks a comprehensive list of credit card accounts [...]
May 11th, 2011 at 2:06 pm
[...] figure really shouldn’t be terribly surprising given the many issues developers have been finding with convincing Android users to pay for apps on the platform. In-app billing launched to consumers at the end of the first quarter six weeks [...]
May 27th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
[...] Reports The Obvious. People Don’t Pay For Apps in Android Market: The research firm reiterates what we reported four months ago. The firm says only two paid apps have been downloaded more than half a million times in the Google [...]
June 14th, 2011 at 12:38 am
[...] search was not able to detect significant downloads of paid apps in the US Android Market. Even the top developers on Android – the ones with over a million downloads of free apps per month in t…. Until recently most Android developers I have been speaking to were primarily relying on [...]
July 5th, 2011 at 5:04 pm
[...] the way down to #27 is a Need for Speed game we have not highlighted for iOS before (though its sale on Android a while back was). Need for Speed Shift was last updated November 27th, and is a racing title [...]
August 3rd, 2011 at 2:22 am
Android market place is so much better than the Apple App Store. It’s easier to find the apps, it’s fairer on ranking (Android’s weighting towards user ‘stickiness’ vs iPhone’s weighting towards no. of reviews) and as such for the same apps (such as Piano Melody Pro) on both platforms we get a 20x more downloads on both paid and free than the iPhone app store.
However the ratio between paid vs free is interesting. On Android 97% of downloads are free, where on iPhone 90% are free.
September 30th, 2011 at 12:11 pm
[...] spot thanks to a 40% off sale that has slashed the price to $2.50. A hit when it was released in last December, the game challenges players to create a million-selling video game by managing their own company [...]
January 27th, 2012 at 3:05 pm
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January 30th, 2012 at 9:45 pm
[...] the same time, the complicated user experience on Google Checkout has made it difficult to get paid downloads on Android despite the platform’s explosive trajectory and growing market [...]
January 30th, 2012 at 9:46 pm
[...] Droid), there are lots of little hiccups that might prevent consumers from paying for virtual goods the way they’ve balked at paying for apps on Android Market. (Developers have historically seen a fraction of the paid downloads they get on iOS simply because [...]