900 Million Army of Android devices that have been enabled to date is likely to push Google Play in pole position among mobile app stores in June.
Google and Apple in may recently announced almost in unison they had reached important milestones for downloads from their respective stores.
Google announced in may it had reached 48 billion downloads on the back of a month which saw the Android users download about 1.5 billion apps. Google had about 700,000 apps available in June, according to the App brain.
The day before, Apple announced iOS owners since opening its App Store in 2008, had downloaded 50 billions of apps – excluding re-downloads and updates – and did so at a rate of two billion apps per month. Apple has about 850,000 iPhone apps and 350,000 iPad apps available.
Horace Dediu, Asymco, mobile analyst at researcher forecasts that Google's play downloads are likely to be on par with App Store downloads at the end of May.
Given two store's prices, Dediu told ZDNet it was "very likely" that Google Play downloads will surpass the App Store in June.
However, it is the large number of Android devices that will drive Google Play in the lead, since iOS owners tend to install more apps than Android owners per unit.
According to Dediu, there are 83 apps per iOS device while there are 53 apps every Android device activation. He added that the gap between the two companies on this metric showed no sign of narrowing.
Liam Tung is an Australian business technologies for many Swedish journalist living a few miles north of Stockholm for its flavor. He received a Bachelor's degree in economics and art (cultural studies) at Sydney's Macquarie University, but hack (no Nordic or malware for that matter) their way into a career as an enterprise tech, security and telecommunications journalist with ZDNet Australia. These days Liam is a full-time freelance technology journalist who writes for various Australian publications, including Sydney Morning Herald online. He is primarily interested in how technology affects the way businesses and people communicate, trade and consume.
