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The First 24 Hours: Android Market vs. App Store

After officially being open for 24 hours, early figures and observations for Google’s Android market are in. While it may be deemed premature to read much into first day findings, they do provide important comparisons to the opening day of Apple’s App Store.

The kind folks at Medialets have provided a multitude of observations and comparisons between the opening days of Apple’s App Store and the Android Market. They report three major similarities between users of both platforms, including:

• They like to play games, shop, and know what music they are listening to,
• They are curious about the weather, and
• They generally share the same interests as iPhone users

In the first 24 hours of launch, 62 free applications were made available to Android users. Upon opening day of the App Store, users were privy to more than 10 times the amount of applications, both free and paid. While thus far only free applications are available for Android users, paid apps will be made available in the first quarter of 2009.

Medialets notes that the Android Market is providing some level of detail pertaining to the amount of downloads per application, which is information that the App Store did not make readily available to the public. Yet instead of displaying exact amounts of downloads, they show different ranges that a given application may lie within. For example, the smallest range observed consisted of applications that had been downloaded between 100-500 times. Inversely the largest range of downloads fit applications into a range of 10,000-50,000. With the information provided, Medialets has determined that roughly 206,000-770,000 downloads had taken place in the first day of launch. While there a a rather large discrepancy here, we can see that the average is around 7,850 downloads per application.

The second observation made was that 9 of the 62 initial applications had made it to the highest echelon, landing in the 10,000-50,000 download range. In the early ours of the App Store launch, Apple’s download data had showed only two applications, Apple’s Remote and AOL’s AIM, to crack the 10,000 downloads mark.

The last observation that Medialets has asserted is the fact that both Android and App Store users appear to have similar tastes in the types of applications that had been downloaded. While this could certainly point to the fact that users of both platforms have similar interests, it may also indicate that Android developers may hold interest in developing applications that are similar to those with proven success in the App Store. The graph below represents normalized names of categories and displays the similarities between the frequency of downloads.

In some respects it is difficult to compare the two, as the Android Market had far less to offer, yet these findings do show numerous instances of similarity. Apple had reported 10 million application downloads from the App Store within the first 72 hours of launch. While the future of the Android Market may still be up in the air, I don’t think we will be seeing the success, at least in shear volume, that the App Store has managed to accomplish.