There are millions of apps in the Google Play Store and while some of them are free, there are also a lot that earn profits from the apps themselves and from in-app purchases. Google has now announced that developers have earned more than $80 billion to date on the platform and they thanked the “developer ecosystem” for making this possible. Taken as it is, this seems like a pretty good number but given that their main competitor is making so much more than that, it seems a paltry number.
Google Senior Vice President Hiroshi Lockheimer tweeted out the report from CEO Sundar Pichai that they have surpassed the $80 million barrier when it comes to developer earnings from the Google Play Store. If you’re one of the app or game developers that are earning their living from this platform, then good for you. Hopefully, you had a good financial reward from your stay at the Google Play Store so far.
Today, @sundarpichai shared that developers around the world (excl. China) have earned more than $80 billion to date on @GooglePlay. Our platform can’t succeed without the help of our developer ecosystem, so a huge thank you for all you do!
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) February 4, 2020
But if you look at the numbers from Apple, $80 billion is such a paltry number. And we’re not just doing guesswork here. Apple says that since they launched their App Store, developers have earned $155 billion. Actually, a quarter of those earnings actually came from just the past year alone. In fact, just between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, their app customers spent $1.42 billion and on New Year’s Day, they had a record $386 million.
So if you compare that to the $80 billion that Google is proud of, then it seems a bit paltry. This is probably due to the fact that there are a lot more free apps on Google Play Store and so users tend to just go for that rather than pay for something they can get for free. Discoverability is also a huge issue with more than 2 million apps within the Google Play ecosystem. They did not disclose the percentage of games earnings from the app earnings but we’re guessing the former is bigger than the latter.
Let’s see if this year Google will be able to catch up or even just close the gap a bit as of course they would want developers to continue with them. One way of enticing them would be to help them to earn money of course so they need to catch up or else lose more to Apple.
