App Annie 2015: Google Play saw 100% more downloads than the iOS App Store, but Apple generated 75% more revenue
In 2015, Google Play saw 100 percent more downloads than Apple's App Store. Double the number of downloads is a huge achievement. In 2014, the figure was 60 percent …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the annual installment of a series App Annie has run for years: the 2014 index put Google Play's download lead at 60% with Apple's revenue lead near 70%, and quarterly updates through 2015 tracked the same shape — a Q1 revenue gap of about 70%, driven by China, widening to roughly 80% by Q3.
The 2015 full-year numbers land where those quarters pointed: Play's download lead doubled to 100% while Apple's revenue lead settled at 75%. Mid-year analysis had already flagged the more important signal — Android users' spending per head rose from a quarter to half of iOS users', with Play revenue possibly overtaking the App Store.
First-order effects
- Developers choosing a launch platform face the trade-off at its starkest: Google Play delivers twice the downloads, but Apple's store still converts them into 75% more revenue, so paid-app and IAP-heavy studios keep prioritizing iOS while ad-supported and reach-driven apps default to Android.
- Apple's revenue lead now depends heavily on China-driven spending growth, making its App Store economics more exposed to a single high-value market even as its global download share shrinks.
Second-order effects
- If Android's per-user spend keeps climbing toward parity, as the mid-2015 trajectory suggested, Google gains leverage to push Play's payment infrastructure and merchant tools in exactly the emerging markets where its download volume is concentrated — attacking Apple's monetization moat at its source.
- Advertisers and analytics vendors get a clearer two-track market: inventory and installs on Android, high-intent paying users on iOS, which pushes ad pricing and attribution products to treat the stores as structurally different channels rather than substitutes.
Third-order effects
- The durable pattern — Android winning volume, iOS winning wallet — points to an app economy stratified by business model rather than platform loyalty, with developer economics bifurcating into reach-first Android portfolios and monetization-first iOS ones.
- By the time App Annie measured Q4 2017, the gap had widened further on both axes — Play ahead by 145% on downloads, Apple by 95% on consumer spend — suggesting the divergence hardens into industry structure unless Android monetization closes the loop.
The trend: App-store economics are splitting into an Android volume engine and an iOS monetization engine, with the per-user spending gap narrowing slowly enough that Apple's revenue premium persists for years.