While Apple may have to largest App Store out there, it seems that Android has the cheapest one. According to App Store analytics provider Distimo found once again that Google’s Android Market has by far the largest share of free applications compared to other mobile app stores.
What’s more this trend is growing, In July 60% of all apps on the Android Market were free, which was up 3% from May 2010. They even put together some nice charts for us so we can see that Android has pretty much double the number of free apps of all the other app stores.
Windows Marketplace has the lowest number of free apps at 22%, followed by the iPad app store at 26%. The iPhone app store only has 29% of it’s apps available for free.
Distimo also has a closer look at the paid apps and finds that the average price of the 100 most popular apps in Android Market and Palm’s App Catalog is higher than the average price of the entire catalogue of applications.
However, the average price of apps on the Apple and iPad APp store is 16% higher but its average price of the 100 most popular applications is nearly three times as high than that of Android.
The success of app stores has mainly been because of how cheep and cheerful these apps have been. And when you look at the pricing structure for all the app stores, 60% of the apps are all priced under $2.
It seems that developers for iOS devices are looking for a bit more revenue as prices of these apps are on the rise. The proportion of paid applications priced below $1 on the Apple App Store for iPad and Apple App Store for iPhone has decreased in both in July 2010, from 30% to 25% and from 49% to 45%
I think another reason why the Android app store has so many more free and cheaper apps is because only a couple of select countries have the paid apps available to them. For instance I have no access to paid apps in Ireland, only the free ones. Google say they’re working on rolling out the paid apps to the rest of the world, but as usual legal stuff is holding them back.
As a result developers are more willing to give away there apps because they know they will reach a larger market, and potentially make more money from adverts etc…
