It is every developer’s dream to gaze at their app that has acquired the top most place in the App store or Google Play. The fact is, in this thriving app industry, the app fanatics are counting on these two major app stores to discover application of their choices. This has certainly made it clear for the developers that in order to witness user acquisition it is essential to get featured on either one or both of the app stores. So does ‘getting featured’ comes in that easy? Definitely not. It takes well-thought out marketing strategies with implementation of precise monetization model to outshine other apps in both the app stores. So what is all the fuss about Google Play v/s App store?
In reality, these app stores are backed with certain factors that unifies them and separates them as well from each other. Let us speculate those factors that separates them and try and find out how do they affect the two major objectives namely monetization and marketing of an app that every developer has to deal with.
Let us find out which store makes a better platform for monetization and marketing an app:
Considering the rate at which Android has outshined Apple in the mobile market shares, it’s clear that Android apps are gaining more and more importance and is bringing interesting revenues. Right? Absolutely no is the answer. Despite of Google play roping in 74.4% of market share it only generates $1.1 million. On the other hand, Apple managing to rope in 18.2% of market share is instead generating $5.1 million per day. It clearly suggests that the Google store lags in generating revenues for its developers. Check out this most recent report that states Apple is the overwhelming choice for enterprise users.
What is the other factor that is pushing the App Store to outshine Google play? According to a report, the difference between iOS and Android advertising is astonishing, with iOS generating 1,790% more return on investment than Android from advertisements on the Facebook mobile app. Also the researches have brought into notice that there are significantly greater return from audiences on iOS than audiences on Android. For the first three quarters of 2013, revenue per click on iOS averaged 6.1 times higher than Android and return on investment on iOS averaged 17.9 times higher than Android.
Also, if the app stores are compared on the terms of the growth in revenues in the countries outside the U.S, the researches showed that the Apple App Store outpaced Google Play in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, China, Taiwan, Japan and Russia. These are the countries where App store has managed to show excellent growth in revenues compared to google play store.
Now, there has been already enough speculations made about the fragmentations in the app stores search and the changes made in the search algorithms recently. On the whole, it has resulted in emphasizing on the importance of App Store Optimization for a better discoverability of the apps in the app stores. While it is still too early to decide on which play store gives better search results as each one is still consistently working on improvising the same. However, it has been derived that the Google play store is serving a better search functionality that makes it even easier for the users to find apps with a misspelled keyword. On the other hand, there are arguments claiming that Google play might be serving better search but Apple has better app discovery and content curation.
Well, it is Google play that has overpowered app store in offering the developers a much wider market to target for their apps. While app localization comes in as a major task for every developer, today Android SDK has to offer some affluent and easy to deal with key aspects of localizing the app compared to the localizing features offered by Apple. The Android SDK is extremely well designed to localize the apps and therefore developers have got greater scope of targeting large masses across the globe by localizing the app in multiple languages on Google Play store.
Now, if we compare these app stores on the number of monetization models that they offer, Google play store offers a vast range of pricing models, while app store has minimal range of pricing points for the developers to choose from. Indeed, it is evident that google play has been generous enough to the developers for allowing them to experiment with the pricing aspect of the apps and developers are trying to make the most out of the platform. While, app store inspite of offering lesser and higher pricing points, it manages to oblige a different set of developers and users to explore the platform.
The decision of considering any one of the both platforms is going to make a major difference to your ROI rates, and affect your profits and business altogether. Android may still make a good choice if your business can offer services more suitable to those on a budget, but if you have decided to go by the recent reports then, in all other cases iOS seems to be the mobile platform to advertise on, regardless of its declining market share size.
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