A new report by AppAnnie has some interesting statistics about Japanese spending habits in the Play Store. According to their research, Play Store Japan is more lucrative than the US when comparing user spending habits. The Japanese Android user will spend roughly 10% more than their US counterpart, an odd turnaround considering that last year Japan was spending about 40% less that we did stateside.
AppAnnie also notes that the Play Store in Japan is the only market is which Google stays competitive with Apple and the App Store. As we know, spending leads to revenue, and that leads to development. For interested Developers, the trend is only going to get better; the percentage of smartphones in Japan is expected to hit 62% by 2014, compared to 50% stateside.
Oddly, Japanese consumers also spent more on games, though they played them less. In Japan, they spend about 1/3 the time we do gaming, but spent more on game apps than their US counterparts. In terms of revenue, this is promising, but we’re smart to remember a few factors that might be contributing to these statistics.
First, while they often shed a light on metrics, we don’t put all of our apples into one basket. AppAnnie has some great metrics, but we don’t consider them to tell the whole tale. Also, we don’t have data on paid vs free apps in Japan. If, like the App Store, there are simply more apps demanding of a few Yen, they’ll spend. More to the point, they may have to pay for apps we can get free stateside, which would lead to a giant discrepancy in the data.
