How Much Do Average Apps Make On Each Platform?

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 &quot;money paid&#x2F;downloads&quot;. 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&#x27;s a substantial source for anyone.<p>Just comparing aggregates, it&#x27;s hard to tell what differences are thanks to the platform and what&#x27;s simply because &quot;the average app&quot; on Android is different from &quot;the average app&quot; on iOS (because of review, barriers to entry, etc.). And there&#x27;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&#x27;s Gingerbread situation. (&quot;The Gingerbread Situation&quot; is also a new punk band I&#x27;m forming, BTW.) And Apple customers seem to skew a little spendier, though maybe that&#x27;s changing.

I can&#x27;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%?

Median value would have made sense here, not mean value.

This would be useful if the distribution of downloads&#x2F;app were a bell curve (meaning being &quot;average&quot; was actually common). I doubt it is.