Over the past 15 years, mobile technology has taken off to a level that nobody could have imagined. Selfies, Tweets, face-time and snapchats are all now part of our everyday life, but not so long ago they were an alien concept. So what has led to this rise in popularity of smartphones? Many put it down to the ease of use but the driving force is the way we can personalise our device to our own needs. This comes down to the apps that are available for us to download, we no longer need to find a phone that includes the software we require, as we have the ability to download the apps that are most important to us.
With the smartphone now being the mobile device of choice for people across much of the world, it means that ever-increasing numbers are downloading apps to use on them. This has led to a fierce battle between the two biggest operating systems; Apple’s IOS App Store and Google Play.
The big rivals in this area are Google Play, which provides apps for Android smartphone users, and the IOS App Store, which is for Apple phones. In many ways there is little between them – they even launched within a few months of one another in 2008 – but which of them is leading the mobile app market? It is difficult to give a definitive answer to this, because both platforms offer similar apps, yet they dominate in different areas. If you look at things in terms of sheer market share, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about who is bigger, with a billion Android devices set to be sold this year, compared with 700 million Apple smartphones. This is translating into greater app downloads for Google Play; showing that Google enjoyed 45% greater downloads in Q1. This is due to the rapid growth of the Android smartphone market, both in established places like the UK and US (a 55% rise in the US alone during this period) and in places like Mexico, Brazil and Turkey. However, despite all this, it is the Apple IOS App Store that still brings in the most revenue, with $5.1 million generated per day, compared with $1.1 billion for Google Play.
This means that all is far from being lost for Apple, although Google appears to be catching them in terms of revenue. The key for Apple lies with ensuring that it can remain the first port of call for top app developers, as it cannot match Android’s market share. Many large companies are taking advantage of the apps to offer its products to a new market, with MobileCasinoCanada.ca slots showing how popular this is. Although it remains a finely poised fight between two giants and, with the sales of smartphone apps growing at a spectacular pace, it is impossible to say for certain which of them will eventually come out on top.