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Comment by sidlls | Hacker News Reader

It is just true. Compared to the only other major mobile app ecosystem, Android users are relatively cheap. That doesn’t mean nobody pays or that nobody who distributes an app earns money through purchases. It just means that on Android it’s a smaller group than on, say, Apple.

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It's pretty straight forward. Users buying phones that cost $250 on average [1] will also spend less money on apps that users buying phones that cost on average closer to $700.

That being said, worldwide Apple only has 20% of the market now so while the average user is cheaper, there are quite a bit more users. That's probably why ad-based monetization also works a lot better on Android (more users).

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/951537/worldwide-average...

Even though Android is 80% of the market, the numbers are still shockingly tilted.

People who choose the cheap option really don't do much discretionary spending, people with iPhones actually make up the majority of revenue for many apps.

I'd actually argue that Android users have more options, thus the market price for apps is reduced by the amount of supply.

When you're looking for a "Todo" app, there's 1000's on Android, and many or most are free. Many people might be better served by a quality app, but when the alternatives are good enough, it's a hard sell.

>Android users have more options

> When you're looking for a "Todo" app, there's 1000's on Android, and many or most are free.

There are also a massive number of "Todo" apps on the Apple app store. Searching for numbers online seems to indicate that there are about 50% more apps total on the Google play store than the Apple app store, but for the more common use cases that still means massive numbers of choices on each store, both free and paid.

I'd like to say that users on Apple's AppStore is especially great about paying for digital contents, rather than users on Play aren't great.

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