For a long time Apple was leading the app market: their App Store had the biggest number of applications and the biggest number of downloads. But things have changed recently, and Android managed to catch up Apple – now both stores have about 700,000 apps available. Moreover, a recent research by ABI Research from London has shown that Apple’s iPhone app download share has dropped to 29% in Q2 2012, though it had always been 30-37% before. Now Android is leading the app market with 47% app download share.
“The iPhone’s download share tends to see a lot of seasonal fluctuation, but over the past year or so it has stayed surprisingly resiliently between 30% and 37% of the total. In our estimates the second quarter represented the first time the iPhone dipped below 30%,” ABI Research analyst Aapo Markkanen said.
How come Android apps are downloaded more often than iOS apps? First of all, according to ABI Research, Android phones are actually selling better than the iPhones, and since there’s a bigger number of Android phone owners, they’re downloading more apps than the iPhone owners. The fact that Google’s Play Store has a bigger number of free apps than the App Store also plays its role.
The next reason of the drop of iPhone app download share was Apple’s decision to get rid of all download bots used by some developers to fake download numbers – that’s how the real number of app downloads came out.
It’s interesting that all the info from above is correct for Android phones and iPhones only, since iPad users still download many, many apps – 5 times more than the users of all Android tablets. According to the researcher, this is explained by the fact that there are many good apps for the iPads, while most Android apps aren’t optimized for tablets’ big screens.
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