Flurry “found a basket of top-rated apps that are available on three major app stores — iOS, Android and Amazon — whose revenue was generated primarily by in-app purchases (prices were the same in each store). Then they compared the revenue generated by those apps for the developers who created them,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“Setting the revenue generated on the Apple App Store at 100%, it found that Amazon’s apps generated 89% per app and Google’s Android apps 23% relative to iOS,” P.E.D. reports. “Google could learn something from Amazon about how to run an app store.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yeah, cripple your tiny screen pretend iPad so that it’s not much more than an electronic shopping cart for your store. Move bunch over Christmas at a loss and never state the sales figures or, most importantly, the returns (see the reviews below). Great lesson, Amazon. Google should ignore it if they care anything at all for their users’ experience and/or their company’s ultimate success.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
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Amazon’s tiny screen Kindle Fire estimated to play distant second fiddle to Apple’s market-dominating iPad – December 6, 2011
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen tests Amazon’s tiny screen Kindle Fire: ‘A disappointingly poor user experience’ – December 5, 2011
Instapaper creator reviews Amazon’s tiny screen Kindle Fire: Bad game player, bad app platform, bad web browser, bad video player and bad Kindle – November 18, 2011
PCWorld reviews Amazon’s tiny-screen Kindle Fire: Flawed, unimpressive, subpar; can’t hold a candle to iPad – November 16, 2011
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The only android tablet people are buying AT ALL is the kindle fire… Small wonder they’re higher than the market place. Big wonder they are as close to iOS as they are
The Fire is NOT an Android device. Too forked up.
Ignorance is not bliss. You simply don’t know what you’re missing.
What will Google do if Amazon steals what little Android profit they have?
**What Android becomes unprofitable for Google?**
If Google were to drop Android, it would cease to be a serious competitor. They’re not making much now, and a few changes could push them into the red. I wonder if that $500 mil number that was recently reported was just marketplace profit and ad revenue or if it accounted for all of the Android dev time over the past four years.
I don’t think it will matter if Google gives up on android. Amazon can continue building their OS and other companies can chop it up and do as they like with it.
Android is already fragmented. If Google quit tomorrow it wouldn’t stop the OS. Hell it might get better if Google dropped out and a few companies used android as the base for their own ecosystem like Amazon did.
Amazon just had a ‘fire’ sale of ‘refurbed’ Fires. No points for how many of them were simply takethisback returns.
well of course! The problem with a tablet like the fire is it’s nowhere near as smooth as the iPad 2, and of course, the screen is like puke compared to a martini (the iPad 3) so customers are disappointed. and now that the iPad 2 price is lower, many people see it as a bargain… the real thing, a screen twice as big, and the massive app ecosystem of apple 🙂
What the article doesn’t include is how many apps were sold on each platform. I’m betting that Apple had far, far more apps sold than Amazon, so even if Amazon’s in-app purchases are 89%, if only 1,000 people bought an app (compared to 500,000 on iOS, say), the developer still isn’t making much money.
Bizlaw – your intuition is correct. This analysis is normalized meaning we are comparing the revenue made per user. There are different numbers of users per platform. We did our best to make this clear in our story, and P.E.D. does clarifies this in the comment section of his story as well. No matter how one looks at it, a user on Amzn is worth 3X more than one on Android. But yes, there are more users on Android than on Amazon. Peter Farago, VP Marketing. Flurry
wasn’t there (or still is…) a problem with the Fire, where people were inadvertently purchasing content and in app purchases?
Once you log into the Fire, there is really no password protection..
My Fire (yeah I have one, it’s around here somewhere..) I can get apps (free ones) without the fire ever asking for a password. my amazon account info was input during setup.. it just uses that info with no verification.
Maybe there is a setting I need to change, but I don’t use the Fire much.
That alone could be some of the reason for the high Amazon purchases.