Developers of paid apps for Google's Android Marketplace are having a much tougher time monetizing their apps than their counterparts developing for Apple's App Store, according to a new report from Distimo released this week.
Distimo got some flak from some quarters for its April report, in which highlighted the growing number of apps in the Android Marketplace but didn't touch on how well Android developers were able to monetize paid apps.
The May report addresses that question and the answer would appear to be, "Not very well."
Nearly 80 percent of paid applications in the Android Marketplace have been download fewer than 100 times, the Dutch mobile apps researcher said in its May report. To date, just two paid Android apps have been downloaded more than half a million times worldwide, as compared to six paid applications in Apple's App Store for iPhone that Distimo found had been downloaded that many times in just two months in the U.S. alone.
One reason for low download rates for paid Android apps, according to the researcher, is that the Android Marketplace has less churn in its top rankings for apps than Apple's App Store.
Google uses more historical data in its rankings than Apple, which means more top-ranked apps tend to stay highly ranked and visible in the Android Marketplace than is the case with the App Store. That limits the exposure of newer Android apps and could be resulting in fewer downloads by users.
"During the month of April, there were 94 distinct applications with a top 10 (free or paid) position in the Apple App Store for iPhone in the U.S.," Distimo said. "[T]here were only 26 distinct applications that reached a top 10 position in the Google Android Market.
"The fact that many applications have been downloaded relatively few times may be at least partially due to the fact that the top charts in the Google Android Market change very little over time in the Google Android Market."
Android app developers do have one monetization option that Distimo reported they were increasingly using—making free apps that are supported by ads.
Citing "the best known example of this," Distimo noted that Rovio Mobile has made its entire series of Angry Birds titles free with ads in the Android Marketplace but has several pay-to-download titles in the App Store with far fewer ads.
And that's not a terrible thing, according to Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka.
"[W]e're very happy with the monetization that it provides us with," Distimo quoted Vesterback as saying in reference to free, ad-supported Angry Birds titles in the Android Marketplace.