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Study: Amazon Trouncing Google in Android App Revenue

33 points by vmyy99 15y ago

jinushaun 15y ago
The article basically concludes that iOS and Amazon users pay for apps, Android Market users don't. Ouch. Google really messed up the launch of Android Market and promoting apps worth paying for.
zrgiu_ 15y ago
App Sales != App Revenue There are tons of apps on the Android market which make loads of money from advertising alone. Flurry doesn't track that. The model Amazon's AppStore uses is entirely different to the one Google Play uses: the appstore encourages app sales, google play encourages free apps with advertising. Remember, advertising is the core income source for Google. To quote the Google Play terms, <the 30% "tax" imposed on app sales is going to carriers, not Google>. This is why when the Android Market was launched in 2008 didn't allow paid apps at all. Not only they didn't have payment processing integrated, the banned one of my apps (twice) in Octover 2008 (a month after the G1 launched) for integrating PayPal payments. This was their plan all along...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  Indeed. They are not measuring total revenue, but "efficiency". This doesn't show that the developers make more from Amazon app store than they make from the Play Store. That would be very hard to believe, considering there are around 60 times more "Android" users than Kindle Fire users. But it does measure app store "efficiency" in relation to the iTunes store - with the Play Store being 4x less efficient (believe it or not, it used to be 50x less efficient in the past) than the iTunes store, and the Amazon store being only 11% less efficient. Google's problem is their lack of a "popular payment method". They slacked for years with Google Checkout, and now when they need it most for Android, (almost) nobody uses it. This brings huge friction in the buying process for most Android users. Compare this to iTunes and the Amazon app store, where pretty much anyone in the Apple ecosystem had an iTunes account that they could already use to pay for stuff, and the same goes for Amazon/Kindle Fire users. There are probably other factors which lower the Play Store monetization efficiency, too, but I believe that's the biggest one by far - so if Google wants to help developers make as much money from Android as they do from iOS, they need to either make Google Checkout very popular for other purposes/services fast, or they need to allow Paypal as a default payment method.
  - twelvechairs 15y ago
    I'm not sure this really is 'efficiency', or at least it is 'active user efficiency' rather than 'store efficiency'. I would think of (store) 'efficiency' as the amount of money made by the developer for the same purchase on each platform. This on the other hand is "revenue generated per active user", which really will say more about how many purchases the average user makes than anything else.
twelvechairs 15y ago
To anyone else who finds it hard to understand what this is measuring, it is supposedly [EDITED] the money that app-developers make per-active-user on in-app purchases (measuring some 'top applications' only). How it is determined is anybody's guess - even the original link [1] is quite opaque on the subject. I'm not sure I can make the same leaps from this to statements like 'the decision to fork Android was a profitable lesson' (for Amazon) as the original links. Please correct me if I have anything wrong here. [1] http://blog.flurry.com/bid/83604/For-Generating-App-Revenue-Amazon-Shows-Google-How-to-Play http://blog.flurry.com/bid/83604/For-Generating-App-Revenue-...
sek 15y ago
Google Wallet is still a joke, i don't have a credit card and it is totally uncommon here in Germany. I have an Amazon account and a PayPal account, these are the two services i can pay with. Google Apps supports Direct Debit, what is the god damn problem? I would have spent probably 50 Euros for Android apps by now. You could believe Google want's to establish Ad revenue first before they make their payment system competitive.

33 points by vmyy99 15y ago

The article basically concludes that iOS and Amazon users pay for apps, Android Market users don't. Ouch. Google really messed up the launch of Android Market and promoting apps worth paying for.

zrgiu_ 15y ago

App Sales != App Revenue There are tons of apps on the Android market which make loads of money from advertising alone. Flurry doesn't track that. The model Amazon's AppStore uses is entirely different to the one Google Play uses: the appstore encourages app sales, google play encourages free apps with advertising. Remember, advertising is the core income source for Google. To quote the Google Play terms, <the 30% "tax" imposed on app sales is going to carriers, not Google>. This is why when the Android Market was launched in 2008 didn't allow paid apps at all. Not only they didn't have payment processing integrated, the banned one of my apps (twice) in Octover 2008 (a month after the G1 launched) for integrating PayPal payments. This was their plan all along...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nextparadigms 15y ago
Indeed. They are not measuring total revenue, but "efficiency". This doesn't show that the developers make more from Amazon app store than they make from the Play Store. That would be very hard to believe, considering there are around 60 times more "Android" users than Kindle Fire users. But it does measure app store "efficiency" in relation to the iTunes store - with the Play Store being 4x less efficient (believe it or not, it used to be 50x less efficient in the past) than the iTunes store, and the Amazon store being only 11% less efficient. Google's problem is their lack of a "popular payment method". They slacked for years with Google Checkout, and now when they need it most for Android, (almost) nobody uses it. This brings huge friction in the buying process for most Android users. Compare this to iTunes and the Amazon app store, where pretty much anyone in the Apple ecosystem had an iTunes account that they could already use to pay for stuff, and the same goes for Amazon/Kindle Fire users. There are probably other factors which lower the Play Store monetization efficiency, too, but I believe that's the biggest one by far - so if Google wants to help developers make as much money from Android as they do from iOS, they need to either make Google Checkout very popular for other purposes/services fast, or they need to allow Paypal as a default payment method.
- twelvechairs 15y ago
  I'm not sure this really is 'efficiency', or at least it is 'active user efficiency' rather than 'store efficiency'. I would think of (store) 'efficiency' as the amount of money made by the developer for the same purchase on each platform. This on the other hand is "revenue generated per active user", which really will say more about how many purchases the average user makes than anything else.

twelvechairs 15y ago

To anyone else who finds it hard to understand what this is measuring, it is supposedly [EDITED] the money that app-developers make per-active-user on in-app purchases (measuring some 'top applications' only). How it is determined is anybody's guess - even the original link [1] is quite opaque on the subject. I'm not sure I can make the same leaps from this to statements like 'the decision to fork Android was a profitable lesson' (for Amazon) as the original links. Please correct me if I have anything wrong here. [1] http://blog.flurry.com/bid/83604/For-Generating-App-Revenue-Amazon-Shows-Google-How-to-Play http://blog.flurry.com/bid/83604/For-Generating-App-Revenue-...

sek 15y ago

Google Wallet is still a joke, i don't have a credit card and it is totally uncommon here in Germany. I have an Amazon account and a PayPal account, these are the two services i can pay with. Google Apps supports Direct Debit, what is the god damn problem? I would have spent probably 50 Euros for Android apps by now. You could believe Google want's to establish Ad revenue first before they make their payment system competitive.