Earlier this week, Google proclaimed an important milestone for Android Market: 10 billion downloads. That's still something like 8 billion behind Apple's App Store. The questions: who, what, when and where? There are answers in a handy infographic posted by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem, yesterday.
Asia rules, based on per-capita downloads -- four of the top-five are from the Pacific Rim. South Korea leads, while the United States nudges past Singapore to capture the fourth spot. European nations claim four of the next five spots, with Israel pushing between Sweden and Denmark for sixth place. Apparently, by the per-capita measure, the Americas aren't so hot for Android Market.
Downloads are greatest 9 pm Sunday. Is that local time where you live or Pacific Time, which would be about 2 pm Monday in South Korea? What is it about Sunday nights? I download apps whenever learning of new ones. What about you, do you Android Market once a week or more frequently?
"Which app was lucky number 10 billion?" Chu asks. "Photobucket Mobile. They’ll be getting a great prize package, including tickets to next year’s Google I/O developer conference".
Games are the most downloaded apps, which makes some sense of the wonky Google TV redesign. There Google puts more emphasis on apps, and clearly games are a priority. Sure, Xbox competition could be a factor, but that's like comparing cassette tapes to vinyl records. They both play music but not the same way or purpose. Apps emphasis on Google TV is more about leveraging what Android's got rather than competing with something else. That said, all of the most-popular categories compete with arcade games available from Xbox Live.
Shazam is among my most-used third-party apps. Google says singer Adele has been Shazam'd 1,789,955 times. I won't give away the whole inforgraphic, and will stop there. Look for yourself, below.
Regarding mobile app stores and platforms, some reader comments to my December 7 "Android Market is unstoppable" story fit nicely with data in the infogaphic. Kenneth Berger claims:
All you have to do is walk down the street to see that despite the numbers Google talks about you still see 10 iPhones for every Android phone..I was at a company that upgraded all 30 users from a mix of Androids and Blackberries to iPhone 4S' in the past few weeks. I do have two friends who love their Android and have no plans to change, but the[y] are clearly the exception. You simply do not hear of people upgrading to an Android phone. In the US the primary market for Android has been people on non ATT who wanted an iPhone and could not get one, or afford one. The Android wave peaked about 3 months ago in the US.
Ádám Körmendi responds:
Actually, you should really try to think globally. It is maybe the case in your neighborhood, but these are global numbers. If I look around here in Eastern Europe the situation is quite the opposite. In my family there are 5 phones: four of them have Android, the fifth has Bada, no iPhone. Among my colleagues: many feature phone, a few Android phone, and no iPhone at all.
If the salaries are lower, yet the phones costs more (mostly the high-end phones and especially iPhone) than in the States, then many will appreciate the cheaper, yet 'smart' phones. I'm not sure what would happen if one day the salaries somehow miraculously rise, but surely until then, those numbers will be true -- globally.
My question to you, if an Android user: What apps do you most use and what were the last three you downloaded? You know where to respond.
