Majority of Apps in Apple Store are Paid vs Android’s Free Slant

Apple’s App Store has become the de facto benchmark for measuring other application storefronts.  With the ever increasing number of Android devices, its interesting to see the contrast between the two stores and their approach to distributing applications.  Pingdom, a leading web monitoring company, recently looked at both and found that Apple leads the Android Marketplace when it comes to paid applications.  Conversely, the majority of applications in the Android storefront are free applcations.

There are many possible reasons for the contrast between the two stores.  Apple’s app store has been around the longest and has a proven track record of successful apps.  Many of the developers selling apps in the Apple store have been able to achieve financial success so developers may be inclined to charge for their apps to try and emulate the success of their peers.  In order to develop an app for the Apple App Store developers must pay $99 per year and get their app approved before it’s made available.  These two hurdles may reduce the willingness of some “hobbyist” developers to try their hand and offer up free apps.

The Android Marketplace in contrast has no approval process so developers can easily and freely ad new apps without worrying whether or not their app will get published.  Pingdom also speculates that the open source nature of Andorid may attract more developers that believe in the open movement and therefore make their applications available for free to the community.

With the number of Android devices quickly growing, it will be interesting to see how the eco-system matures and compares to Apple’s in the next 12-18 months.  One can assume that the support of developers will be critical for Android’s continued success and these developers will eventually want to make money for their effort.  If paid applications don’t become a larger percentage of the Android Marketplace, it could be a bad sign for the app ecosystem.