Games take largest share of Android’s first 10bn downloads

This article titled “Games take largest share of Android’s first 10bn downloads” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 9th December 2011 07.47 UTC

Android games have notched up more than 2.5bn downloads since the launch of Google’s Android Market store, taking a 25.6% share of the store’s first 10bn downloads.

Google revealed the 10bn milestone on 6 December, adding that the Market is currently generating 1bn new downloads a month. That followed an announcement in November that more than 200m Android devices had been activated, with 550,000 more coming online every day.

The company has now published an infographic on its Android Developers blog digging into the Android Market data, including the claim that the most popular time to download apps from the store is 9pm on Sundays.

There is also a chart for the “Top 10 Most App-crazed countries” ranked by downloads per capita. South Korea tops the list, followed by Hong Kong, Taiwan, the US, Singapore, Sweden, Israel, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway.

Entertainment is the second most popular app category in terms of downloads, taking a 12.2% share. It’s followed by Tools (11.17%) and Communication (6.45%), with Productivity, Personalisation, Music & Audio and Social all taking shares higher than 4%.

There are some quirky stats too: 1.87m hours have been spent using the Android IMDb app in the last four months; 12bn miles are navigated on Google Maps every year; nearly 1.8m Adele songs have been tagged using Shazam; and 4,054 years have been notched up in the Talking Tom app.

Google is bullish about the appeal of Android for app developers in 2012, with chairman Eric Schmidt telling the Le Web conference this week that he expects more companies to focus on Android alongside or even ahead of iOS next year, thanks in part to the new Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) software update.

“Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking,” said Schmidt, according to CNET.

“There are so many manufacturers working so hard to distribute Android phones globally that whether you like ICS or not – and again I like it a great deal – you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first.”

The counter-point to Schmidt’s argument about volume is that developers are also driven by revenues, especially when it comes to paid apps. Convincing developers to release their premium apps on Android alongside or ahead of iOS may require more case studies of these kinds of apps making good money on the Android Market.