The number of apps in the Google Play Store grew by more than 50% last year, outpacing Apple’s App Store for the first time, according to a new report.
The latest numbers come from appFigures, an analytics service that monitors data from the thousands of apps that use its platform. The report noted that all three app stores it looked at — Android, iOS and Amazon’s Appstore — saw a large amount of growth, but Google saw significantly more than the other two.
“What’s interesting is that although Apple continues to grow strongly, it’s really Google Play that’s growing,” the company wrote. “In 2014, the number of apps distributed through Google Play has doubled.”
Analytics company App Annie, which tracks app store data from Google Play and Apple’s App Store confirmed withMashable that Google Play does indeed have more apps than the iOS App Store.
As of this writing, Google Play had nearly 300,000 more apps than the iOS App Store — a difference of about 17% — according to the company.
appFigures doesn’t speculate about the reason behind these changes in growth but there are likely a few factors at work. Android still has an overall larger marketshare than iOS globally, so it makes sense that more developers would be attracted to the platform. Google also makes it much easier for developers to create new apps and doesn’t put Android developers through the same lengthy approval process as Apple.
However, it’s worth pointing out that, as a whole, iOS developers still make far more money than their Android-based counterparts. Even though Android downloads were 60% higher on Android, iOS developers still made 60% more money, AppAnnie found in its Market Index report for the third quarter of 2014.