App Annie report on iOS and Google Play stores in Q1 2018: downloads grew 10%+ YoY to reach 27.5B, and consumer spending grew 22% YoY to reach $18.4B
Context & Ripple Effects
App Annie's quarterly tracker has become the running scoreboard for the two dominant app stores: it counted nearly 26B downloads in Q3 '17 and [[a:920896|$15B of consumer spend in Q2 '17, when emerging markets were already widening Google Play's download lead over iOS]]. The Q1 2018 print continues that cadence — 27.5B downloads and $18.4B spent — and the follow-on quarter confirmed the trajectory with 28.4B downloads and $18.5B in spend in Q2.
The pattern across these reports is a widening split: download volume keeps compounding fastest where willingness to pay is lowest, while the dollar figures concentrate elsewhere — by late 2020 App Annie was reporting that 65 cents of every app-store dollar went to iOS. Q1 2018 is an early data point in that divergence.
First-order effects
- App publishers planning 2018 roadmaps get a bigger but bifurcated market: Google Play's emerging-markets-driven volume growth means reach, while iOS remains where the $18.4B in quarterly spend concentrates.
- Store operators Apple and Google can point to double-digit YoY growth in both installs and spend as evidence their commission-based businesses are still expanding, not plateauing.
Second-order effects
- Developers chasing Play Store's download growth are pushed toward ad-supported and freemium monetization, since the same corpus shows per-user spending skewing heavily toward iOS.
- Ad networks and mobile measurement vendors gain leverage as publishers optimize across two stores with opposite economics — volume on one side, revenue per user on the other.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the app economy matures the way the later reports show it did: download growth decelerates (204B in 2019, up just 6% YoY) while spending growth persists, shifting competitive value from acquiring installs to monetizing existing users through subscriptions and in-app purchases.
The trend: The app economy is decoupling install volume from revenue, with Google Play compounding downloads in emerging markets while iOS consolidates the majority of consumer spending.