Android Market is only worth ONE million dollars?!?
Posted: September 2nd, 2009 | Author: TimConneally | Filed under: Android, Lifestyle | Tags: Android, android market, app, bought, buy, caveman, coding, cowpotato, downloads, facts, free, froogloid, guitar, how many, how well, itunes, jtribe, market, my, paid, pedersen, popular, quote of the day, sales, sell, sold, solo, statistics, stats, store, today, tommy, trial, useless, yesterday | 2 Comments »Sure enough, after all the fuss thrown up over the state of the Android Market, it turns out that we could track sales all along, and Jtribe released a free app in the second week of August simply “Android Market Stats” that attempts to chart the progress of Android’s ecosystem, and in doing so, lends credence to the notion that the Android Market is pathetic.
We’ve been collecting data on the Android Market for the past 8 months and publishing it on androidstats.com. We have been able to watch the Android Market grow to it’s current size of just over 7000 apps and almost 3000 publishers, recording every movement made within the market…Considering all this, along with app price and days on sale within the market, we have been able to determine the monthly revenue from the (US only) Android Market to be closer to $1M USD.
Well…that’s even less than was predicted a couple of weeks ago.
But let’s not feel sad. The good news is that we don’t have to guess any more, we can use Jtribe’s statistics, which are gathered completely independently of Google. We may not be as prosperous as the iTunes app store yet, but at least we can revel in our open data.
Jtribe’s app lets you check the week’s biggest movers, check price changes that took place the previous day, or browse the market as you normally would.
It lets you filter the apps according to which ones are for pay and which ones are free, or you can check out all of them at once. You get a clear picture of who’s hot, and how much they’re making if they’re charging. In today’s top overall rankings, there’s actually only one paid app, a game called Brain Twister by The Game Boss, which was bought 150 times today.
UPDATE: I misunderstood what the numbers next to each app stood for. As Chris from Froogloid informed me (see below) these numbers do not correspond to number of times downloaded (which I thought seemed really really low) but instead, are numerical rankings. I have altered my post accordingly. Thanks Chris, keep up the great work!
As someone remarked on the Techcrunch article I linked to the other day, Android is not a gaming platform*…and the Android Market Stats app shows it clearly. Today’s most popular game, CowPotato 3D by Froogloid (the guys who made the Keyring rewards card app) was downloaded 304 times, then SuperYatzy-free edition by Tommy Pedersen was the second most downloaded with 162.
Android Market Stats app by jtribe
All the data in the app is also available on Androidstats.com, where you can do the same comparison of free and paid apps.
Hopefully, the guys at Jtribe will get my pingback and let us know a little bit more about their methodology.
It’s a rather dull app, unless you’re a stats fan (which I am), so having the ability to track the Android Market’s progress is very exciting to me.
*see comments
Hi, decent article, but I feel the need to help clarify some of the inaccuracies. Don’t take is personal, I just want the facts to be straight….
You’re confusing number of “downloads” with number of spots in “popularity”. For example, CowPotato was not downloaded 304 times last week, it moved up in “popularity” 304 spots. To put this in perspective, we released CowPotato as a “beta” 8/24 (i.e last week). As you can clearly see in the android market, CowPotato has between 5,000 to 10,000 downloads in a little over one week. That’s an average of almost 1,000 downloads per day. As of today (9-3-09) CowPotato’s popularity ranking is 37 of 374 games in the “casual” category and 223 of 785 in all game categories. Not bad for one week in the market as a beta product…
One other clarification, Froogloid is the maker of “Key Ring Reward Cards”.
Can you expound on why you think android is not a gaming platform? As a mobile OS, sure it has it’s limitations but not more so than any other competitive mobile OS (iPhone for example).
Thanks for the great article and keep up the good work! We need more people blogging about android
Chris
Froogloid, LLC
The discussion I was reading revolved around the closed nature of Apple’s iPhone/iPod touch platform, and how game devs have a certain level of confidence that every user will have the same experience. With Android, there is no single hardware profile, and there’s the possibility that it could turn into a less user-friendly PC gaming type environment where only certain phones can play certain games due to the variance in specs.
It really won’t be a problem until some supremely weak (or, conversely, supremely dominating) devices are released. But, with China Mobile using Android for OMS/OPhones, it seems like only a matter of time before skimpy freebie handsets start rolling out.