Apple Users More Willing to Pay for Apps

In the battle for smartphone platform supremacy, Android has built an insurmountable lead over iOS over the years. According to Gartner, Android devices accounted for more than 85 percent of global smartphone sales last year with iOS a distant second at 14 percent market share.

The huge installed base of more than 2 billion Android smartphones should be argument enough for app developers and publishers to treat Android as their primary mobile platform. And yet there is another aspect that explains why many developers still favor iOS over Android: monetization.

According to data published by App Annie, Apple device users are far more likely to spend money on or in apps than Android users are. In 2017, Android users accounted for 70 percent of global app downloads but generated only 34 percent of total app consumer spend. This is not a temporary occurrence either as the following chart shows: while Android’s share of app downloads has gradually climbed from 46 to 70 percent between 2012 and 2017, the platform’s share of consumer spend has remained at 34 percent for the past two years after peaking at 38 percent in 2014 and 15.