iOS vs Android: Developers Still Choose iOS Over Google's Android, Make More Money Off Apple’s App Store Than Android Market

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A few days ago Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage in Paris, France at the LeWeb conference where he surprised the audience with claims that developers will soon prefer the Google’s Android ecosystem over Apple’s iOS App Store. We chuckled at the time, realizing that such a thing is not possible yet, for several reasons and it looks like we were not the only ones to take his statements with a huge grain of salt.

Flurry Analytics decided to see whether such claims are based on actual facts and looked at various data available to the company from developers that are using Flurry Analytics tools to monitor their apps. Unsurprisingly, the findings of Flurry revealed that not only is iOS still dominating the mobile apps environment, but that iOS developers make more money than Android devs, which is, at the end of the day, the main reason they will choose Apple over Google for now.

Flurry points out that while Google Android activations and overall market share beat Apple’s numbers for the U.S. market, the iOS universe is a lot more promising to developers. There are various reasons Flurry cites, including the increased popularity of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, Apple’s new distribution deals with Verizon and Sprint, the still existing Android fragmentation, the lack of a powerful Android flagship device, the Android Marker lack of curation and the inability for some Android users to actually pay for Android apps (Google Checkout penetration).

According to Flurry numbers, more developers start iOS projects rather than Android ones, and the graph above shows that in the fourth quarter of the year nearly 75% of apps integrated with Flurry Analytics are iOS apps. In fact it looks like Android’s share has been decreasing since the beginning of the year, while the number of iOS and Android device sales have been increasing.

The second graph shows us that iOS apps pay a lot more than Android applications:

Anecdotally, developers consistently tell us that they make more money on iOS, about three to four times as much. To be sure, we pulled a sample of in-app purchase data from a set of top apps with versions on both iOS and Android, comprising of several million daily active users (DAUs). Running the numbers, we find that, on average, for every $1.00 generated on iOS, the same app will generate $0.24 on Android.

Are you a mobile app developer? What’s the first platform you develop for?