Despite selling less than 20% [1] of smartphones across the world, its App Store accounts for over 64% [2] of app revenue. Apple and its developers somehow built an App Store that people are willing to spend more money on.
If it's purely thanks to developers, why isn't there more revenue on Google's Play Store?
[1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...
[2] https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-q1-20...
Most of the sales of Android phones are at a lower price bracket which might indicate the purchasing power of customers, so they would naturally have less purchasing power than ones on iOS. People with more purchasing power would spend more on even apps and this reflects in the App Store revenue.
There are certainly people who buy Android flagships because they prefer the platform/device but this might not be true for lower end Android phones. iPhone has an aspirational value in many parts of the world.
Those users will also be more likely to spend on apps and accessories in order to justify or supplement the much bigger phone purchase. Someone who's got the same amount of expendable income but chooses a cheap android for frugality is also more likely to be frugal in extraneous purchases like apps, especially when free but slightly inconvenient alternatives are available. At the end of the day, focus on the customers not the app platforms.
All given the size of the Chinese market, their love of mobile games, and the massive portion of App Store revenue games represent.
That's not to say the App Store isn't more profitable than the Play Store, per user, just in the US, but its a closer margin here, and I think the massive disparity on a global scale has to signal that something else is going on
(in addition to the obvious: Apple doesn't make good cheap phones, just not in their DNA, but Android manufacturers do, so lower income individuals will bias toward Android phones, and these people would spend less in the associated application stores)
Source: I worked on an app with millions of paid subscribers.
As a result iPhones have 50% of the smartphone market in the US, and Americans have the highest disposable income per capita of any large country (>20 million people).
iPhones tend to have much smaller market shares outside of the US. In some places they're maybe around 30% but generally they're much, much lower.
It's a function of wealth, not first mover advantage. Well off people choose iPhones. That should tell you something.
And to the OP's number, Apple has ~25% market share. Not 20%. Those numbers are shipments, not usage. which is for the 100th times meaningless in nearly all topics.
All the data we have on global/domestic smartphone shipments, active users, monthly actives, daily actives, dollars spent, ruples spent, per app category, minus games, fiscal/calendar quarterly, it all comes from these dodgy "Global Insights" app consulting firms. You head to Google and search "App Store Quarterly Revenue" and you find a different Statista or BusinessOfApps or whatever site each quarter, all their data just linear extrapolations from active pings from trackers they pay apps to install which are increasingly getting blocked by OS security controls. Google and Apple almost never share explicit data (this Epic trial has been a nice departure from that, to be fair); if they share anything, its an overtly generalized market segment like "Services", which of course they're using to inflate the apparent revenue of bad business divisions they want to look good by combining them with the actually good divisions (same reason why Microsoft put Azure in the same shareholder-reported category as Office early on; of course, nowadays, its amazing on its own).
And then, re-read that last paragraph and realize I said "Google & Apple" and you didn't even blink. Sure, Google & Apple, that's who we're talking about. No; we're talking about Android & iOS. Android; that operating system that has unlocked computing for the entire world, including vast swaths of people who can barely afford plumbing and electricity, that's side-loaded and hacked to the ends of the earth, that's startlingly popular and preloaded with hardware-specific storefronts in countries that, traditionally, don't like sharing data with the west.
Sure, "your" app was more profitable per-install on iOS than Android. An excellent, informative experiment. The assertion is that iOS has "special sauce" that makes consumers money-drunk, and they spend more. Did we control for income disparity? Surprise; No. Did we aggregate a broad swath of consumer application categories, including (especially) gaming, as gaming is by-far the largest source of consumer application spending, globally? Surprise; No.
How's this sound: People spend a shit-ton of money in apps. This fact, alone, is reason enough that letting a single company gatekeep the experience for any significant number of people is unacceptable. Justifying Apple's monopoly by saying they're better at making consumers money-drunk is psychotic.
Most of my Data were deduced /inferred from Official Apple and Google, Mobile Carrier, Government Numbers. For more numbers Benedict Evans slides has many more details.
Well, we can argue until we go blue about how maybe he's lying, or twisting words, or how the App Store alone represents a business larger than many Fortune 500 companies and its irresponsible/incompetent of them to not track it. Reality is probably a little of all of the above. But it speaks to how insane these conversations are; magical incantations of deductions and inferences to arrive at seemingly significant percentages and magnitudes which have no basis in reality.
Here's a statement I'll agree with: "An application distributed on iOS is likely to return higher per-install revenue than the same application distributed on Android." But if you read that, and believe for a second that it should inform some broader policy or even application development decision making, then we're on completely different pages.
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-05-19-apple-exec...
The more correct analogy is a McDonald's franchise that actively uses every method at their disposal to prevent other fast food restaurants from opening near where you live.
Take a look at the history of Apple's efforts to block jailbreaking in combination with the AppStore rules that disallow 3rd party app stores. It is quite clear that Apple has use multiple methods to successfully fighr off the arisal of any alternative stores.
Apple openly admits to doing this, it really isn't a controversial claim.
McDonald’s will probably, however, make no effort to prevent you from selling lemonade from your driveway, or even prevent Coca-Cola (or Coca-Cola’s direct competitors) from selling soda at McDonald’s direct competitors. (If they did do this, I would agree that it’s anti-competitive behavior that ought to be opposed.)
If Apple wanted to take on development risk for all of the apps on the app store by paying for all that developer time, then we'd be talking about something that is sorta kinda not really the same thing.
I certainly did not say it was. Your whole comment reads like you are replying to someone else.
The best I can tell, you agree that Apple is engaged in anti-competive behavior by preventing developers from selling "lemonade" in other stores (because they prevent those stores from existing.) Not only that, but users aren't even allowed to buy "lemonade" in their own driveway, they are forced to go buy "lemonade" through Apple.
The App Store is a 'store' in this case (it's in the name) and is the only store where you can buy items for your Apple home.
Imagine if Walmart sold homes and you could only put items in it that were bought at Walmart.
I’m not sure why you introduced homes to the analogy. That’s a very different scenario.
In what way is a home that you fill with stuff you bought in a store different from a computer that you fill with stuff you bought in a store?
The users buy the phone, not Apple. It's amazing this is even contraversial.
It's really not a complex idea, hopefully that's enough for you.
Kinda, except that video game consoles, unlike iPhones, usually allow you to play physical media that you can buy from any source (so consoles aren't quite as bad.)
How far this extends into the current day is up for debate, and how much rent keeping Apple should be allowed to do, sure, but being dismissive of the instrumental role Apple played in the past and to this day is turning a blind eye.
Umm.. this is some serious revision of the history.
- People did pay for apps. I along with plenty of other devs happily paid for Sublime Text while not going through an app store.
- There have been app stores that predate 'iOS App Store' like the Steam store, people paid for apps in it as well. It is infact cross platform and competes with other app stores.
Apple did not invent app distribution or the concept of paid apps.
Basically, Apple is a wealthy neighborhood. If you sell nice bags or expensive cars, you want to be near the people who can afford them. So you need to rent store space in the wealthy neighborhood. Where rent is higher than in the outskirts.
Sure you could try to sell your goods in the outskirts (the Play Store) but you won’t sell as much.
To bring it back to non-metaphors. Apple is the only maker of premium phones. Therefor people who are willing to spend on apps are very often iPhone users. So if you want to reach these people and their money you need to be on the App Store. Apple knows this, and charges developers accordingly for the privilege.
So by your own admission, Apple has a monopoly on the premium market, and is using that power to broker their audience for a premium fee to developers who simply want to sell their code to someone who's willing to pay for it?
That is one of the most dystopian arguments I've ever heard, bravo.
And it is also simply untrue that Apple is the only premium handset maker- plenty of Chinese competition in China and Samsung elsewhere.
It is dominant in the segment but it is at best part of a duopoly.
I’m not seeing how Apple’s behavior is any different than that of other players who have a stronghold in their markets though?
It’s exactly the same with $10.000 rents in San Francisco or super expensive country clubs where you can mingle/deal with fellow rich people: it’s expensive to get access to a scarce resource.
Apple has the scarce resource (people willing to pay for apps) so they charge you a lot of money to access it (30% of your revenue).