April 2013

APP DOWNLOADS: AMAZON APPSTORE VS. GOOGLE PLAY

By Anne Hezemans, Analyst at Distimo
Publication - April 2013

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Publication - April 2013

ame is n y m Hello,

A brief introduction
Distimo was created because the founders were frustrated by the lack of insights into the performance of their apps, and the manual work needed to track the most important metrics.
Today, Distimo provides the #1 free app store analytics tool, tracking over 3 billion downloads / quarter for major developers worldwide. Distimo AppIQ is the most accurate source of app data that helps developers and financial services companies to make well informed strategic decisions in the global app market.

We offer three core services: App Analytics

track your apps across all major app stores and ad networks.

AppIQ
get access to the most accurate and daily download and revenue estimations for any app.

Conversion Tracking measure your full app sales funnel from discovery to app launch.

Founded in 2009, Distimo is a privately held company based in The Netherlands. Follow us on Twitter, read our blog or learn more at www.distimo.com.

Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Publication - April 2013

New and noteworthy

This months report dives into the Amazon Appstore, a third-party app store for the Android platform. Distimo plans to add AppIQ support for the Amazon Appstore in terms of estimated daily downloads and one-off revenues. The initial results are provided in this months report, which includes the estimated download volumes and revenues of the top apps and top publishers in the Amazon Appstore. The report also looks at the differences and similarities between the Amazon Appstore and Google Play. All data contained in this months report covers the Amazon Appstore in the U.S. in March 2013, unless otherwise noted. Please note that our estimates are based on the ranking per appstore. Due to differences among stores we report device installs for Google Play and user downloads for Amazon Appstore.

The major findings are:

The top 200 free applications had a total of sixteen million downloads in March 2013, U.S. The most downloaded applications were Games.

The most downloaded free application in the U.S. in March 2013 was Temple Run 2 by Imangi Studios, LLC.

The number of device installs for free applications in Google Play is much higher than they are in the Amazon Appstore. Roughly speaking, Google Play is more than ten times bigger than the Amazon Appstore in the U.S.

Fruit Ninja Free is ranked #9 in Amazon Appstore. The application was downloaded 9.1 times less than in Google Play. It had 2.3M device installs in Google Play and 250k downloads in the Amazon Appstore in March.

The top 200 paid applications had in total 1.6 million downloads and earned 3 million dollars on one-off fees in March 2013.

The Amazon Appstore competes aggressively with Google Play in terms of the top 1000 paid applications: the number of paid downloads is roughly twice the size in Google Play.

The new paid application Temple Run: Oz by Disney is ranked #5 in the Amazon Appstore. The application was downloaded 3.4 times less in Amazon Appstore than in Google Play.

The top publisher based on the number of free downloads, is Rovio Entertainment, Ltd., with its most popular application in March The Croods, which is also ranked in the top 10 free apps.

Alongside this publication we host a free webinar on the subject of App Downloads: Amazon Appstore vs. Google Play on Thursday 2nd of May @ 5:00 PM (CET)/11:00 AM Eastern. Please register here to join the webinar.
Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Publication - April 2013

Introduction
The Amazon Appstore is a third-party app store for the Android platform that launched two years ago in the U.S., and expanded to the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain by the end of 2012. Amazon recently announced that it intends to expand the Amazon Appstore to almost 200 countries in the near future. Distimo intends to add AppIQ support for the Amazon Appstore in terms of daily estimated downloads and one-off revenues. The initial results are provided in this months report, which includes the estimated download volumes and revenues of the top apps and top publishers in the Amazon Appstore. The report also looks at the differences and similarities between the Amazon Appstore and Google Play. All data contained in this months report covers the Amazon Appstore in the U.S. in March 2013, unless otherwise noted.

Top free applications

The top 200 free applications had total of sixteen million downloads.
With AppIQ, we estimated the number of daily free and paid downloads for the Amazon Appstore. Based on these numbers the top 200 free applications had sixteen million downloads in total. The most downloaded applications were Games. The top 10 free applications in the Amazon Appstore in the U.S. are presented below for March 2013. The most downloaded free application was Temple Run 2 by Imangi Studios, LLC. It is been followed by Word4Pics: 4 Pics 1 Word by BrainVM Games and Subway Surfers (Kindle Tablet Edition) by Kiloo.

Top Free Applications March 2013 in the U.S.

Application
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. new new Temple Run 2 Word4Pics: 4 Pics 1 Word Subway Surfers (Kindle Tablet Edition) Guess The Word - 4 Pics 1 Word Beach Buggy Blitz The Croods Netflix Facebook Fruit Ninja Free Angry Birds Rio (Ad-Free)

Publisher
Imangi Studios, LLC BrainVM Games Kiloo Loga games Vector Unit Inc Rovio Entertainment Ltd. Netflix, Inc Facebook Halfbrick Studios Pty Ltd Rovio Entertainment Ltd.

The top apps in the Amazon Appstore offer a strong top 10. Five new applications entered the Monthly Leaderboard: Beach Buggy Blitz, The Croods, Fruit Ninja Free, Word4Pics: 4 Pics 1 Word, and Guess The Word - 4 Pics 1 Word. The latter two made huge jumps from their previous rank #64 and rank #160 to rank #2 and #4, respectively.

Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Publication - April 2013

When comparing the number of device installs/downloads1 of the Amazon Appstore with Google Play, the number of downloads for free applications in Google Play lies much higher than in the Amazon Appstore. Roughly speaking Google Play is more than ten times bigger than Amazon Appstore. The number of downloads of some applications vary heavily among the two appstores. The following barchart shows three examples of free applications with their download volume. Fruit Ninja Free by Halfbrick Studios Pty Ltd is downloaded 9.1 times less in Amazon Appstore than in Google Play. It has 2.3M device installs in Google Play and 250k downloads in the Amazon Appstore. Jetpack Joyride of Halfbrick Studios Pty Ltd is doing fairly well in the Amazon Appstore as it has 216k downloads, while it has 818k device installs in Google Play. The third example Jewels Stars of iTreeGamer is ranked #50 in the Amazon Appstore in March. It was downloaded 8.4 times more in Google Play than in the Amazon Appstore.

Monthly downloads for three free applications in Google Play and Amazon Appstore March 2013, U.S.
Thousands 2,500

2,000

1,500

1,000

500

9.1x
Fruit Ninja Free

3.8x
Jetpack Joyride

8.4x
Jewels Star

Top paid applications

Based on the estimated downloads of paid applications we also ranked the paid applications of the Amazon Appstore. The top 200 paid applications had 1.6 million downloads and gained $3 million dollars on one-off fees in March 2013. Also the paid top applications were mostly Games.

The top 200 paid applications had 1.6 million

The top 10 paid applications in the Amazon Appstore are presented below. The most downloaded paid app in March 2013 was Minecraft- Pocket edition by Mojang. Furthermore, the paid monthly top application list saw less change, compared to the top free applications, with only one new application entering the Monthly Leaderboard at #5: Temple Run: Oz. Moreover there was only one big mover from rank #207 to rank #10: Nail Salon (Kindle Tablet Edition).

downloads and made $3M on One-Off revenues

Please note that our estimates are partly based on the ranking per appstore. Due to differences among stores we report

device installs for Google Play and user downloads for the Amazon Appstore.

Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Publication - April 2013

Top Paid Applications March 2013 in the U.S.

Application
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. new Minecraft - Pocket Edition Bike Race Cut the Rope Temple Run: Brave Temple Run: Oz Where's My Water? Angry Birds Star Wars Premium HD (Kindle Tablet Edition) Plants vs. Zombies (Kindle Tablet Edition) Survivalcraft Nail Salon (Kindle Tablet Edition)

Publisher
Mojang Top Free Games ZeptoLab Disney Disney Disney Rovio Entertainment Ltd. PopCap Games, Inc. Candy Rufus Games LiBii

Price
$6.99 $0.99 $0.99 $0.99 $0.99 $0.99 $0.99- $2.99 $0.99 -$2.99 $3.99 $1.99

The number of paid device downloads in Google Play is overall two times the number of paid downloads in the Amazon Appstore. Although if you zoom in on the application level you can find examples of applications who perform better in the Amazon Appstore than in Google Play. In the following barchart again three examples are displayed. The first is a new application Temple Run: Oz by Disney. It is ranked #5 in the Amazon Appstore. It has over 140k device installs in Google Play, while in the Amazon Appstore this number was 42k, which makes the device installs 3.4 times the number of downloads in Amazon Appstore. Bloon TD 5 by Ninja Kiwi has 2.6 times more device installs in Google Play than in Amazon Appstore. The third example is Monkey Preschool Lunchbox by THUP Games, LLC. Contrary, this application was downloaded more in the Amazon Appstore than in Google Play. It had 5.7k downloads in the Amazon Appstore and 5.0k device installs in Google Play.

Monthly downloads for three paid applications in Google Play and Amazon Appstore March 2013, U.S.
Thousands 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 Temple Run: Oz Bloons TD 5 Monkey Preschool Lunchbox

4x 3x

3.4x 3x 2.6x 3x 0.9x

Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Publication - April 2013

Top Publisher in the Amazon Appstore

Aside from looking at the most popular free and paid applications, one might wonder who the top publishers are based on the number of downloads. These types of lead-

The top publisher in March 2013 is Rovio Entertainment, Ltd

erboards are now also available on AppIQ for Google Play and the Apple Appstore. Per store publisher rankings are based on respectively number of free downloads, number of paid downloads or total revenue. Returning to Amazon Appstore, the top publishers based on downloads of free applications, are presented below. Rovio Entertainment Ltd. was the top publisher in the Amazon Appstore in March 2013. Its most popular application in March was The Croods, which is also ranked in the top 10 free apps. The top three publishers have not changed in the last month. New entries in the Top 10 are TabTale LTD, Electronic Arts, Inc. and BrainVM Games.

Top Free Publishers March 2013 in the U.S.

Publisher
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Rovio Entertainment Ltd. Imangi Studios, LLC Disney Halfbrick Studios Pty Ltd TabTale LTD Kaufcom GmbH Gameloft Electronic Arts Inc. BrainVM Games Kiloo

Best Application
The Croods Temple Run 2 Where's My Water? Free Fruit Ninja Free Babies Dress Up Gingerbread Run Free Ice Age Village Real Racing 3 (Kindle Tablet Edition) Word4Pics: 4 Pics 1 Word Subway Surfers (Kindle Tablet Edition)

Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Publication - April 2013

Comparing Revenue
We already looked at the number of downloads by the top applications and concluded that the Amazon Appstore competes aggressively with Google Play in terms of the top paid applications: the number of paid downloads is roughly twice the size in the Amazon Appstore. The gap is smaller when looking at revenues. The top 200 paid applications in Google Play in the U.S. made $5.2 million in March 2013. This makes Google Play 1.7 times bigger Amazon Appstore. There are applications that perform in the Amazon Appstore than they do in Google Play. An example of this is Survivalcraft by Candy Rufus Games, which earned almost triple its one-off revenue in the Amazon Appstore than it does in Google Play. Survival Craft made $48,418 on total revenue in the U.S. in Google Play in March 2013, while it made $130,879 on one-off revenue in the Amazon Appstore in March 2013, U.S. Below you can see a screenshot from AppIQ how the daily revenue in Google Play developed throughout March and April 2013.

Daily revenue of Survival Craft in Google Play

AppIQ Estimates
Distimo collects two sets of data. The first is publicly available data, such as app and publisher names, prices, rankings, and ratings. For the Amazon Appstore, Distimo collects the free and paid rankings since gross rankings are not available at the Amazon Appstore. The second data set Distimo collects consists of transactional data downloads and revenues from developers that use Distimo App Analytics. All download and revenue volumes are calculated for all ranked applications based on a daily sampling of both data sets. When calculating downloads and revenues for individual apps, Distimo AppIQ always excludes that apps transactional data from the analysis to preserve the confidentiality of the developers data. The numbers of free and paid downloads are calculated with this methodology for the Amazon Appstore in the U.S. The one-off revenue is calculated based on the paid downloads and the price of the applications.

Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Publication - April 2013

Recap
The Amazon Appstore is rapidly becoming more and more competitive with Google Play. The number of applications in the Amazon Appstore has grown significantly over the last year, especially in terms of paid applications where the Amazon Appstore and Google Play are nearly neck and neck in terms of downloads. Complementary to this report, Distimo hosts a free webinar on Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 5.00 PM CET/11.00 AM Eastern. If you have questions youd like answered during this webinar, please send them to anne@distimo.com.

Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Publication - April 2013

Track daily downloads and revenues of any app with Distimo AppIQ
Distimo AppIQ allows users to:
Track and compare app downloads and competitor app downloads: Analyze an apps market share and compare download figures versus a competitors in one chart. The chart shows the daily downloads and can also be aggregated per week or month. Events such as price changes, featured listings and version updates are also included, and allow the user to analyze the influence of each event on downloads. Analyze competing app revenues including those from in-app purchases: View daily revenues from competing apps side-by-side with the their own app and get extensive insight into the revenue generation of different business models, revenue per country, and platform. Identify the most popular and upcoming new apps: The Leaderboard provides the daily rankings of all applications, and can be viewed by app store, country, category, device, and free/paid/gross. All of the major app stores are supported, and for iOS and Android, the daily volumes per individual app are also provided. AppIQ users see the daily downloads and revenue from in-app purchases and one-off fees. Developers can also use the Leaderboard to see how many downloads are needed to achieve a certain ranking on any given day.

Learn more about AppIQ at www.distimo.com/appiq

Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Publication - April 2013

Contact us
For sales inquiries, please contact Remco van den Elzen, VP Business Development at remco@distimo.com or call +31 30 82 00 567. For press inquiries please contact Mindy M. Hull at mindy@mercuryglobalpartners.com or call +31 62 504 7680 (EU) or +1 415 889 9977 (USA).

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Distimo 2013, some rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.