In the category of impressive numbers coming from Android today, we also get to hear that the Play Store now has 600,000 total applications, which is almost as much as Apple’s 650,000 applications, although Apple counts the same app twice, if it’s made for the iPad, so in reality there are around 425,000 phone apps, and 225,000 tablet apps, while Android’s phone apk’s can include the tablet version as well.
Google has also announced that there have been 20 billion app installs in total so far, while 1.5 billion are installed every month. The total of app installs is a little behind Apple which has 30 billion installs so far, but that’s because the iPhone appeared earlier, and had a much bigger head start by 2010 when Android just started to really grow. As far as monthly app installs go, they both have around the same now, and Android will probably surpass Apple very soon, which means they should be able to catch up in total app installs by the next I/O, too.
Google has also announced that their Play Store is available in 190 countries, although only in 132 of them you can get paid apps, and in about half of them you can use in-app payments. Google has definitely stepped up their game here, because in the past these numbers used to be a lot smaller, and I think they worked hard to improve the situation a lot over the past year or so. By comparison, Apple’s store is available only in 152 countries.
Google has also added a nice feature for developers, called Smart Updates, that will make their apps update only the new code, which means smaller download for the users, and less data usage if they were updating through a data connection. Google looks like it’s starting to care more and more about developers these days, so hopefully more of them will soon be able to say that they make even more money from their Android app than their iOS app.