Developer: Android More Profitable than iOS

Posted 03/10/2011 at 7:55am | by Paul Lilly

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Apple's App Store is filled with more than 350,000 applications. According to AndroLib, the Android Market has about 280,000 apps. Apple in January announced that App Store Downloads topped 10 billion. Again, according to AndroLib, the Android Market sits at 3.7 billion and climbing. If looking just at these numbers, then clearly the advantage belongs to Apple. But if you're a software developer, there's one very compelling reason you should consider Android over iOS.

Spacetime Studios, a developer that codes apps for both platforms, says that time and again it notices much higher user activity on Android, ComputerWorld reports. Take the company's Pocket Legends MMO game, for example. Spacetime Studios says Android users download the app about 9,000 times per day, versus 3,000 to 4,000 on the iOS platform. That's more than double the activity on Android, and perhaps as much as triple.

"We've just been blown away," says Spacetime CEO Gary Gattis. "Android has become our primary interest."

Interestingly enough, Spacetime says Android users are more apt to click through ads, which is another way the developer generates revenue with Pocket Legends and other titles. According to Spacetime, Android users click on ads three times as much as iOS users, and end up making a purchase from those clickthroughs twice as often as iOS users.

"This led us to stop advertising on Apple and throw all of our marketing dollars onto Android," Gattis says. "It really just makes sense from a financial point of view."

So why the disparity? Gattis chalks it up to more tangible support from Google, which is "trying to nurture the gaming community." On the flip side, Apple's approval process is more stringent. Gattis likens the Android Market to the old wild West, the one "where the gold rush people made their claim."