Apple put out a big press release on the state of the App Store.
It's loaded with all sorts of big, interesting numbers:
- Apple has had 40 billion app downloads, and half of those happened last year.
- Apple developers have made $7 billion on the App Store.
- Temple Run was downloaded 75 million times in 2012.
- Two game studios brought in over $100 million combined.
While all of those are nice, a reader emailed to point out this is the most important number in the press release: "The App Store has over 500 million active accounts."
In consumer tech, companies like to measure themselves by their monthly active users. Facebook, for instance, says it has 1 billion monthly active users. Twitter says its has 200 million active users. Yahoo has 728.4 million monthly users, according to comScore.
Apple is right in the mix with these companies. There is of course, one key difference. To use Twitter, Yahoo, or Facebook, all you need is an internet connection. To use the App Store, you need an internet connection, and an iOS device which has an average selling price around $450.
Facebook, when it went public, said it was getting $4.10 per user around the globe for 2011. Twitter is estimated at less than a dollar per user. Yahoo is getting $6.80 per user (using trailing twelve month revenue data). Apple gets 100X the average of those companies.
More importantly from Apple's perspective, it's financially and emotionally costly to switch from iOS to another platform. Quitting Facebook for Google+ means losing out on most of your friends. But, you can try to talk them into joining you at Google+. Giving up on Twitter costs nothing. Leaving Yahoo, as Yahoo knows, isn't hard.
Quitting iOS for another mobile platform means losing your $300-$650 iOS device, plus all the apps you've downloaded. Will some people still quit iOS? Certainly, some people will quit. But, the vast majority are going to stick around once they've invested money and time learning iOS.
Here's another advantage Apple has over the other companies we've mentioned. To use the App Store, you generally need a credit card. That means Apple could have 500 million credit cards on file. If it ever wants to explore payments it has a massive advantage over the competition.
We've reached out to Google to get its active Android numbers, but haven't heard back yet.
In June it said it had 400 million active Android devices. On its most recent earnings call it said, "Today, there are over half a billion Android devices, half a billion, with 1.3 million more being activated every day." We don't know if that means half a billion active devices or just half a billion have been sold.
Using the 500 million number, it suggests that the disparity in market share we see reported between iOS and Android isn't entirely accurate. Apple and Android are basically tied at zero in their quest to grab then next wave of mobile users around the world.
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