I have a very popular app for iOS and Android. Both have the same functionality. These figures (5x more revenue on iOS) is pretty consistent with what I see. For many apps moving forward I am actually not creating Android versions as it is simply not worth the effort.
It seems very misleading to me to just calculate average revenue by "money paid/downloads". At least a while ago a popular model on Android was to publish the app free and make money with advertising. So the average payout per app is probably much higher.<p>Although I also suspect it follows a power law, so a few apps make lots of money and most apps make little to no money (on all platforms).
You <i>really</i> want a survey of some folks who have released similar apps on multiple platforms, and to cover the development-cost and revenue sides, including in-app purchase and any ad revenue, if that's a substantial source for anyone.<p>Just comparing aggregates, it's hard to tell what differences are thanks to the platform and what's simply because "the average app" on Android is different from "the average app" on iOS (because of review, barriers to entry, etc.). And there's nothing about costs.<p>Much as I like Android, I bet iOS tends to be the better deal for paid-app developers right now. You have fewer devices to target and no equivalent of Android's Gingerbread situation. ("The Gingerbread Situation" is also a new punk band I'm forming, BTW.) And Apple customers seem to skew a little spendier, though maybe that's changing.
I can't speak to the iOS and Android numbers, but they are significantly off on the Windows Phone numbers.<p>MSFT just announced their WP downloads stand at 2 billion (a significant delta from the 0.65 billion estimated here) As for units sold, Nokia alone has sold 20 million Windows Phones or so, and there is another 20% of non-Nokia WP phones on top of that.
Simply averaging does not mean a lot. Does anyone have any stats which take into account the fact that 5% top apps get a lot more reveneues than the bottom 80%?
This would be useful if the distribution of downloads/app were a bell curve (meaning being "average" was actually common). I doubt it is.