Android falls short in the apps category when compared to Apple’s trademarked App Store, but current figures show the Android Market is doing pretty well. According to Google there have now been over 3 billion apps installed from the Market. Most impressively the last billion apps were installed in the last three months, a huge jump in activity (11 million/ day). The app numbers are accompanied by an update from Google that there are now 350,000 activations of new Android devices every day. That puts the platform on a pace to hit over 127 million activations in a year.
Google didn’t share any information in the financial conference call about how many of those apps are free apps. Most likely most a few of them but if even a low percentage of the apps installed from the Market are paid, there is some money to be made by app developers. These figures from Google don’t include any app installation numbers from the young Amazon Appstore. The Amazon storefront doesn’t have many apps on the shelves and likely isn’t selling enough to include in Android numbers.
Android tablets don’t factor into these numbers in any numbers as companies are only just getting them to market. This year will see a lot of Android tablets go on sale, and it will be interesting to see how it affects these two key metrics for the platform.
