Smartphone and tablet users downloaded 28.3 billion apps from the Google Play Store in the third quarter of this year.
That’s three times more than what was digitally sold at Apple’s App Store. The figures come from market researcher SafeBettingSites.
For Google, this is the highest number of downloads so far: a record that, according to the researchers, is primarily related to the corona crisis, which means that people spend much more time indoors.
Apple users collectively downloaded 8.2 billion apps in the third quarter. Remarkably, that is not a record, but a decrease. In the two previous quarters, this involved 9.3 billion iOS applications.
To put the most current figures into perspective, in the first quarter of 2017, Google Play achieved 16.7 billion downloads compared to 6.5 billion for Apple (two and a half times as many). A year later, the counters were at 17.4 and 7.7 billion applications, respectively.
It is not shocking that Apple has to lose out to Google in terms of downloads. The global market share of iOS is, at about 15 percent, much smaller than that of all Android devices combined (about 85 percent). They are relatively speaking.
However, the number of apps downloaded from Apple’s store – one in three – is remarkably high.
Today, Google Play is also the store with the most apps in the showcase – there are now more than 2.7 million. Apple users can choose from 1.82 million applications, Microsoft’s Windows Store is home to 669,000 apps, and the Amazon Store (an alternative store for Android applications) currently contains some 450,000.
