Guessing they don’t pray. Star Wars reference aside, learning about rampant Android piracy really made be rethink the pay devs receive for their effort. Per Business of Apps:
- Consumers spent $47 billion on Google Play apps and games in 2023
- Over 113 billion apps and games were downloaded on Google Play last year
- 2.61 billion apps and games are available to download on Google Play
- The top grossing app on Google Play in 2023 was Google One, a cloud storage service Instagram was the most downloaded app on Google Play last year, with 521 million downloads
The rest of the report is paywalled, so the number I was curious about – MAUs (ideally DAUs, but that’s a lot of time in Calc) for paid apps with at most 10,000 downloads – is probably out there, but it’s a Beehaw post. That report was the only result on DDG’s first page relevant to the query “google play store apps by downloads.”
All this to say, Apple’s 30% and, well, walled garden that covers piracy to a sufficient extent is starting to look like the better choice for my next phone. And I have been an ardent avoider of Apple products since college.
I buil(t) my rigs, with every component suited to my needs (or budget; YMMV – winning an i7-8086K gave me a lot of breathing room on the GPU side), but my life on a 24VDC electrical system has convinced me that a laptop need to replace my rig, and Apple seems to have my needed “lots of power with incredible battery life” nailed. But I now have to pick a final product that I didn’t build and thus have no idea how to troubleshoot a hardware problem.
Except, I’m a light gamer, building factories and such. Being on ARM doesn’t work.
I don’t want to be in the iPhone-x86 crowd. Most things are doable, but hardly seamless. But giving up Factorio is a bridge too far.
I’m no longer seduced by Google’s lie that app makers are rolling in the dough when it’s actually slave wages supporting freeloaders. Sure, this is only one example, but as the issue is with Google policy, it’s likely representative. That’s why I wanted to see the figures.
Part of me thinks this rant could have also worked in Politics. 🤣
Well, while I don’t understand their stubbornness of supporting Google drive, (Google restricts it so much? Ok then just remove it and blame Google. Replace with Dropbox/WebDAV/ftp/whatever) IMHO they’re right about the piracy. Years ago I tried to be an app developer for Android and iOS and I personally experienced that iOS users are willing to pay for everything. The in-app purchase to remove ads on iOS was bought by many, while on Google play literally a single person got it. Maybe it can be simply that because iPhones are 5x more expensive than the average Android (in my country there are no carrier locking and no carrier discounts at all), then users are wealthy or they’re adult workers, while kids and students get the cheaper Android phones.
I closed both dev accounts years ago and now I’m android user. As an user, I simply cannot imagine paying $5 on Android for a glorified text editor with all the free alternatives that are available. Maybe android users are cost conscious?
This is the top 10 most sold apps in my country:
Now, this is definitely alarming.
A smartwatch watchface is the #8 most sold app in a country with 30 million android users???
#2 and #7 have a combined download count of 20k! And are in the top 10???
Peakfinder is the #6??? How many people in October are trekking so much that they need to know which mountain are watching???
Tasker and nova launcher?? Yes I also bought those two apps but are for power users, the 1% of users.