Apple
All three of those tech giants took the opportunity to disclose some interesting tidbits about their businesses, complete with various statistics on their ecosystems. Let’s see how they stack up.
Is there an app for that?
With the importance of apps as the primary content sources for mobile ecosystems, these figures are pretty important.
Sources: Apple, Google, Microsoft.
In terms of total apps, Android is quickly closing the gap with iOS. This speaks only to quantity, and not at all to quality, and both storefronts are inevitably filled with countless free fart-machine apps and other lowbrow offerings.
Additionally, Apple also mentioned that of its total, 225,000 are optimized specifically for the iPad, while Google didn’t break out any tablet-specific metrics for its offerings. With Microsoft’s tablet OS, Windows 8, due out later this year, it has no tablet offerings to speak of.
| Company | Apple | |
|---|---|---|
| Total app downloads | 30 billion | 20 billion |
| Countries available | 155 (including 32 recently launched last week) | 190 (paid downloads in 132) |
Sources: Apple, Google.
There have now been a total of 30 billion iOS App Store downloads, and 20 billion for Google Play. Both repositories continue to expand aggressively internationally, with Apple just launching the App Store in 32 additional countries last week, bringing its total to 155. Android apps are available in 190 countries, although only 132 of these support paid downloads. Google also said that over half of app revenue now comes from in-app purchases.
The 100,000 apps that the Windows Phone Marketplace now has is about the only meaningful statistic that the software giant disclosed this month, presumably because its device activation figures would likely look embarrassing compared to those disclosed by both Google and Apple.
Speaking of device activations…
A race with no finish line
Apple CEO Tim Cook said that there have been a cumulative total of 365 million iOS devices sold to date. Referencing my tracking, that includes 218.1 million iPhones, and 67.1 million iPads through the end of the first quarter. It’s worth noting that the difference between those figures is 79.8 million devices. Some of these include iPod touches, which Apple doesn’t break out specifically, and possibly some Apple TVs that run iOS.
Any way you slice it, it also implies that Apple has sold quite a few iOS devices in the second quarter, so its July earnings release likely has some upside in store.
Sources: Apple, Google.
Google is now up to 400 million cumulative Android activations, with adoption accelerating as it was at just 100 million a year ago. The search giant said it’s up to about 1 million activations per day, which translates into about 12 per second. Android didn’t really begin ramping up adoption until 2010, and has dramatically outpaced iOS, thanks to its substantial market share lead.
Apple’s user base is more up to date on the latest version of its platform, with 80% of users on iOS 5, while just 7% of Google’s base has upgraded to Android 4.0.
Social butterflies
Google also mentioned some statistics regarding its Google+ social network that we can handily compare to Facebook
Sources: Google, Facebook.
Half of Google’s MAUs, or 75 million, are active on a daily basis, while Facebook boasts 526 million daily active users, or DAUs. Google simply said that more users access Google+ on mobile devices than on traditional PCs, while Facebook has 488 million mobile MAUs, or about 54% of its total MAU base.
Stacking up
On the mobile front, Google continues to lead in terms of overall market share and activations, while iOS has a slightly more robust app ecosystem, as Android catches up. Microsoft is still late to the party, but is certainly improving its offerings.
Facebook remains the dominant social network by far, with Google+ still far behind, although it's gaining traction. There’s inevitably some overlap here of users on both networks, but Facebook’s overall user base still stands far taller.
This battle royale is far from over.
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