Distimo's Year-End Report Shows Why Developers Love iOS: iPhone 4x Android Revenue, iPad 2x
There are now over a million mobile applications available across the top seven major app stores, according to mobile analytics firm Distimo in its year-end report for 2011.
Context & Ripple Effects
Distimo's year-end report lands on top of a market that analysts already sized as enormous: back in February 2011, a widely cited forecast put mobile app revenue on track to reach $38 billion by 2015. What Distimo adds is the distribution question underneath that number — with more than a million apps now spread across the top seven stores, where does the money actually land?
The answer, per the report, is overwhelmingly Apple's side of the fence: the iPhone generates four times Android's app revenue and the iPad twice as much. For a developer choosing where to invest scarce engineering time at the end of 2011, that gap is the whole decision.
First-order effects
- Developers weighing iOS against Android get a hard quantitative case for prioritizing Apple first, since the same app effort yields roughly 4x the revenue on iPhone.
- Google faces a concrete monetization deficit to explain: Android's install base is not converting into comparable app-store revenue, putting pressure on its store economics and payment tooling.
Second-order effects
- Android OEMs and carriers leaning on app ecosystems as a selling point must compete against a platform where developers launch and monetize first, weakening the 'open ecosystem' pitch at the high end of the market.
- Analytics and app-intelligence firms like Distimo gain leverage as the arbiters of these cross-platform comparisons, making their methodology and definitions part of the competitive story itself.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile development consolidates around an iOS-first sequencing model — build for Apple's paying users, port to Android for reach — which entrenches Apple's position even where Android wins on device volume.
- Persistent platform-level revenue gaps invite scrutiny of store terms and payment rails, since whoever controls the storefront captures a fixed cut of a pool that forecasts already projected into the tens of billions.
The trend: Mobile app economics are splitting along a monetization divide — iOS capturing disproportionate developer revenue while Android competes on scale — and year-end measurement reports are becoming the industry's scoreboard for it.