The Independent ran a story yesterday commending Google Play, the Android app marketplace, on being just days away from reaching its 15 billionth download. The strange thing is, when Tech Crunch approached Google to verify this landmark, the company said they’d reached 15 billion “a few weeks ago”. Either way, it’s an impressive number of apps.
Rebranded from Android Marketplace (which originally launched in 2008), Google Play gives Android users access to over 500,000 apps for the multitude of devices running Google’s mobile OS.
The last official stats from Google quoted that they’d hit the 11 billion download mark, before Google Play’s rebranding in the last quarter of 2011. In comparison, Apple’s App Store reached that same 15 billion download figure in July 2011 and as of March, quote that downloads currently stand at a total of 25 billion.
Despite the greater number of downloads iOS users have racked up, it would appear that the download rate is slowing up. Although the App Store is experiencing around 1.25 billion downloads a month to Google Play’s 1 billion, mobile app marketing firm Fiksu state that Apple download rates fell by 30% in March.
To top it off, Google have paid out around $320 million to developers, whilst Apple are close to $4 billion. Costly.
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