Study Finds More Than $100 Billion Spent on App Stores in 2020 (macrumors.com) 23
A new report by Sensor Tower reveals that 2020 has been a record-setting year for worldwide spending on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, which collectively passed $100 billion in a single year for the first time ever in November. From a report: The trend of increased spending continued over Christmas, when consumers around the world spent an estimated $407.6 million across Apple's App Store and Google Play. This represents a 34.5 percent year-on-year growth from approximately $303 million in 2019. At the same time in 2019, spending only increased by 17.1 percent year-on-year. Spending on Christmas day constituted 4.5 percent of December's total spending so far, which reached nine billion dollars globally on December 27. The majority of holiday spending was on mobile games, which climbed by 27 percent from $232.4 million at the same time last year to $295.6 million. Tencent's "Honor of Kings" was the leading game with approximately $10.7 million in consumer spending, which is a 205.7 percent increase from Christmas 2019. TikTok was the top app for spending outside of games, generating $4.7 million globally. Following previous years, Apple's App Store captured the majority of spending between the App Store and the Google Play Store, with 68.4 percent of spending, up 35.2 percent year-on-year. The Google Play Store saw $129 million in revenue compared to the App Store's $278.6 million.
nice (Score:4, Funny)
Broken math? Nickels to $100 billion? (Score:3)
Actually your nickel-each-app joke makes more sense than the numbers in the story. (Sorry no funny mod points to give.)
The summary talks about most of the money in games and talks about millions of bucks. But where the heck does the $100 billion number come from? I even resorted to reading the linked story. In total desperation, I went to the next level of links. Still can't figure out where the heck they pulled that $100 billion out of. Is this somehow related to mythical stock prices? (Also searched every
Bottom Line (Score:3)
It would be interesting to find out how much of all that generated revenue actually ends up in the app developers pockets and how much is cut by Google, Apple etc and other companies on the way.
Also the amount of money spent of apps vs advertisement would also be interesting to know. Anyone have any data on this?
Re: (Score:2)
Apple normally takes a big old 20% cut. So that is 20 billion to Apple, and 80 billion to the App developers.
That is a lot of money for a mostly automated App Review policy, and storing a hundred megs of data, and downloading it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It would be interesting to find out how much of all that generated revenue actually ends up in the app developers pockets and how much is cut by Google, Apple etc and other companies on the way.
70+%
Re: (Score:1)
On the other hand, one has to remember that Apple all but created this market to allow developers a nearly frictionless revenue stream.
The previous models, things like shareware, simply did not have the incentives to encourage developers to create innovative products nor a method to reliably monetize it.
Re:Bottom Line (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Probably $0 to Apple and Google as they were all free apps, and $100B to advertisers as they raped all the data from the phone.
Most of the money is in user data and free apps.
What else do these apps cost you? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Provocative enough for the reply, but I wouldn't give you a mod point even if I had one to give. Were you fishing for FP so your brevity cut off your insight?
Why don't the google and Apple help us know about the "cabbage"? My idea would be a "financial model" tab or section for each app. The developer would explain where the money is coming from so we could assess the app better (including how long it's likely to have support). Most of the time that would be just selecting from a menu of the usual suspects,
Why not push towards Web Apps. (Score:2, Insightful)
HTML5 support most of all the features needed to run 90% of all those mobile apps out there. Heck most of the Apps out there are just a browser going to their site.
As an App developer you just need to code the program once, and it will work for Apple, Android, PC... You can charge what ever fee for the service, without having to pay an App Store to use it.
Re: (Score:2)
most of the time native apps are faster than using a browser and support more features
Re: (Score:3)
HTML5 support most of all the features needed to run 90% of all those mobile apps out there. Heck most of the Apps out there are just a browser going to their site.
As an App developer you just need to code the program once, and it will work for Apple, Android, PC... You can charge what ever fee for the service, without having to pay an App Store to use it.
Because half of what makes IAPs such easy money is how easy it is to pay. Click the 'buy now' button, and once to confirm, you're done. HTML5 apps require users to input their CC# all over again, which takes away from the flow of the game, people have to actually think about what they're paying for and who they're giving their details to, and so on. Even a little bit of friction massively reduces the number of people who will actually pay.
From the dev side, if you're going to try and use some sort of third
Re: (Score:2)
You might code it once, but the user-interface of web apps is almost systematically worse than a native app and it almost always is worse-performing (this is more important on phones than on the desktop - I have stopped using applications because they drained the battery too quickly even if they were "fast enough"). This in turn will affect your sales (so yes, it costs less but you earn less as well).
Maybe in principle, web apps could be better, but it actually is hard to be 100% cross-platform and take adv
Re: (Score:2)
But did that buy anything of value? (Score:2)
TikTok? (Score:2)
What are people buying there?
False Headline (Score:1)
i've spent $0 (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)