Android Market Monthly Revenue Revealed

The Apple App Store is worth $200M monthly says GigaOM compared with $5M in the Android Market Place. The guys over at Larva Labs estimate it's even less and we agree. We've now managed to calculate that number and it comes in a lot lower than expected.

We've been collecting data on the Android Market for the past 8 months and publishing it on androidstats.com. We have been able to watch the Android Market grow to it's current size of just over 7000 apps and almost 3000 publishers, recording every movement made within the market.

The Android Market also gives an indication how many times an app has been downloaded, for example RetroDefense has been downloaded somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 times. It is important to remember that Android users are able to try out an app for 24 to 48 hours without their credit card being charged. Therefore the actual sales an app is making is somewhat lower than the reported download count.

Considering all this, along with app price and days on sale within the market, we have been able to determine the monthly revenue from the (US only) Android Market to be closer to $1M USD.

Android has a long way to go to get anywhere near the size of Apple's App Store both in terms of revenue and size. Apple hit 65,000 apps in July compared to 7,000 apps in the Android Market Place today. We have plenty more data from androidstats.com which we plan on releasing regularly on this blog so make sure you grab our feed.