Google Play is growing faster, but Apple's App Store brings in way more money: Distimo
App analytics firm Distimo has published a new report looking at how Google Play and Apple's App Store have fared in 2012. It finds that while the former is growing rapidly, the latter still beats it more than four-fold in terms of revenues.
Context & Ripple Effects
Distimo's year-end report puts hard numbers on the split personality of the 2012 app economy: Google Play is the faster-growing store, while Apple's App Store still out-earns it by more than four to one. The finding traveled widely — pickups at CNET, PC Magazine, Digital Trends, Silicon Republic and others within days — suggesting the volume-versus-revenue question had become the default frame for comparing the two stores.
With no comparable full-year breakdown in the corpus before this one, the Distimo report functions as a baseline: it is the measurement both ecosystems' 2013 strategies will be judged against, and its four-fold revenue gap is the number developers cite when deciding where to launch first.
First-order effects
- Developers planning 2013 launches face a concrete trade-off: Google Play for faster-growing distribution, Apple's App Store for revenue that Distimo measures at more than 4x Google Play's.
- Distimo converts the report into positioning as a reference source for store-level analytics, with the wide same-week pickup across eight outlets amplifying its brand beyond its own client base.
Second-order effects
- Monetization strategy splits along the measured line: studios chasing revenue weight iOS first and treat Android as a reach channel, while ad-supported models migrate toward Google Play where paid-app economics lag.
- Google faces pressure to close the monetization gap on Play — carrier billing, gifting, and merchandising become the levers it can pull — because the 4x revenue figure is now the headline every developer reads.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the app economy structurally divides into an Android volume market and an iOS value market, with third-party analytics firms like Distimo (and rivals) becoming the arbiters developers trust for allocation decisions.
- A persistent revenue gap invites scrutiny of each store's take rate and payout terms, since the platforms' cut of a four-fold difference is itself a material business line.
The trend: App-store economics are bifurcating into Android-led download growth versus iOS-led revenue concentration, making annual analytics reports the scoreboard developers plan around.