Infographic: Google Goes Wild With Android Market Stats. Google’s been celebrating their recent Android Market milestone with a string of discounted (and awesome) apps, but really — what’s a celebration without an infographic?
Thankfully, Google has come through on that front with a slew of stats about the Android Market and the people who use it. For example, despite Android being the most widely used smartphone OS in the United States, Americans are actually only the fourth most active app downloaders in the world. South Korea takes the top spot in this category, with Hong Kong and Taiwan coming in second and third respectively.
What’s more, the most popular time to download apps is 9PM on a Sunday, which certainly makes sense to me. After all, what better way to get pumped for a new week than to find apps that help kill time at work? There’s a lot more to dig into, so take a few seconds and peruse — you know you’re dying to find out how many keystrokes people have collectively saved using SwiftKey. Google Play About To Pass 15 Billion App Downloads? Pssht! It Did That Weeks Ago. Way to blow your own horn, Google.
Yesterday a newspaper in the UK, the Independent, ran a short item about how Google was about to reach an app milestone — 15 billion apps downloaded. So we reached out to Google to ask about this… and guess what? It already happened. A Google spokesperson tells us the milestone was passed “a few weeks ago.” The last number that Google released with more public declaration was 11 billion downloads, when the store was still called the Android Market, which it announced during its Q4 2011 earnings in January.
Apple reached 15 billion app downloads in July 2011, and the most recent number for Apple is 25 billion downloads in March 2012. Doing the basic math, that roughly means that Google is seeing about 1 billion downloads of Android apps per month, while Apple is seeing about 1.25 billion app downloads per month. Data revealed in the Oracle v. Google Play: 600,000 Apps, 1.5B Installs Per Month, 20B Total, Intros Smart App Updates, Encryption. Today at Google I/O, Google announced Smart App Updates for mobile so users only have download changes, not an entire app over again to update.
Smart App Updates are just 1/3 the size of a normal download so they save data and battery life, and are available from Gingerbread and above. For users of the new Android OS 4.1 Jelly Bean, app downloads are now encrypted. Meanwhile for developers, there’s Google Cloud Messaging, a free system for delivering Android notifications, plus several other new tools. And to give you an idea of the scope of the Google Play media and app store, Google announced it now has more than 600,000 apps, over 1.5 billion app installs per month, and over 20 billion app installs total.
Seems the rebranding is going pretty well. Google provided some stats on the growth of Google Play abroad, and how its payments are evolving. Smart App Updates Google announced Smart App Updates today to easy the pain of keeping your Android apps current.