The point about Play and App Store

Appfigures, the platform that studies data relating to mobile apps, observed the main app stores. To compare the two platforms, we usually look at the turnover and earnings of the developers, while for 2017 an equally interesting figure emerges: the number of apps published.

At the end of 2017 the Play Store could count 3.6 million apps published, recording a 30% increase compared to 2016. The App Store on the other hand is dropped from 2.2 million at the beginning of the year to 2.1 million at the end of 2017, with a -5%.

This fall, however, is due to a more effective policy Apple's restrictive development guidelines and the elimination of old ""clone"" apps or that did not support the 64bit architecture.

This last factor is evident also considering the current year: 1.5 million apps have been released on the Play Store (+17%, the best since 2014), while on the App Store only 755 thousand (-29%).

Another theme is related to the practice of porting, i.e. transferring an app from one platform to another; There are many apps available only on one platform, for example on iOS and then created and then brought to the store dedicated to Android systems. The reverse path is It was much less frequent: this year the porting of 7,500 apps was published on the App Store (i.e. coming from the App Store). At the end of 2017, 450 thousand apps were present in both stores, or only 8.5%.

The Appfigures data shows how the most used are Cordova and Unity, which together account for 70% of apps created with third-party tools.