As Benedict Evans wrote in his weekly newsletter, Apple reported its revenue from the app store in 2014.
Apple reported that app store revenue net of its 30% commission was $10bn in 2014. This is actually the same as the figure it gave at WWDC in the summer for the previous 12 months – I suspect there’s some rounding going on. Apple’s commissions on this would be about 2% of CY 2014 revenue.
Although we will not know exactly what the rounding error was, given the very strong growth of the app store in the past, it is quite difficult to believe that sales have suddenly flattened out. So to get a better picture, I decided to provide an update to my series of articles on the iOS App Store vs. Google Play (most recent one is here).
In that article, I lamented that App Annie was not giving out the actual growth of neither the App Store nor Google Play and as such, it was impossible to see whether the revenue gap was closing in absolute terms.
Since then, App Annie has reported its Portable Gaming Spotlight, 2Q14 report in conjunction with IDC. This report gives us a direct answer.
As you can clearly see, iOS App Store absolute revenue growth is larger than Google Play absolute growth. Although Google Play is doing remarkably well on a YoY percentage basis (>+100%) compared to iOS App Store (+70%), it is not closing the gap at all.
Also you have to keep in mind that Google Play revenue is increasingly games. In fact, App Annie notes in their Q3 2014 report that, “Games drive nearly all Google Play Revenue Growth”. This is presumably not the case with iOS which suggest that the gap between the App Store in Google Play revenue is wider and also growing if we include non-game apps.
Actually, my view is that the difference in non-game app category is more interesting than the total difference. It’s likely that by now, iOS has about 6-times more non-game revenue than Android. This means that apps like Byword, RunKeeper and others which are either paid-apps or in-app payment apps are struggling on Android.
Naofumi Kagami 