Google’s Android is the fastest growing mobile platform today and is expected to lead the mobile operating system market by 2014 with 29.6% of overall market share. However, Apple still dominates in many aspects of mobile market, beating Android with significant margin, like app store, number of app downloads etc. Interestingly, Android is silently surpassing other competitors and heading towards unanimous leadership position with regular time intervals.
As per latest research, Android will surpass Apple only to become the biggest mobile application store by September 2011. Currently Apple leads in this space with 381,062 apps in App Store compare to 294,738 apps in Android Marketplace. The new research from research2guidance, a mobile market research and consultancy firm, projects Android App Marketplace dominance with 425,000 apps expected by August 2011.
Report claims that Android Market place has added 28,000 new mobile apps in April this year alone. Â Apple lagged behind with only 11,000 new apps in the same month. However, 64% of total Android apps are free which is above average compare to any other app store. Though, this ratio is slowly getting declined and, consequently, paid apps are improving their market share with an average price of $3.23 per app in April.
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Surprisingly, predicted Android app market growth is only going to help app developers marginally. As the app market grows, number of app for each process gets multiplied and this results in subsidize price of each app.
The intelligent move for developers is to focus only on niche market and develop related apps to enjoy the highest benefits from early launch advantage. Also, instead of taking whole set of users into consideration, developers should become more localize centric while developing their apps.
Android is going head-to-head with Apple as both of them are leading in separate market. Recently, While Apple App store recorded 10 billionth app download, Android has narrowed the gap with 3 billion app downloads. If Apple dominates app sales revenue market, Android beats Apple in revenue generated from Ad impressions.
Whatever the situation, next one year is going to be very crucial for Android (Google) and iOS (Apple) from the prospective of market & performance dominance.
