App Annie and Apple: Two different perspectives on the same numbers

Last Friday, App Annie published a report on revenue from mobile platforms. Shortly after the release of the data, Apple turned to the resources that posted the report, wanting to refute the opinion about the drop in revenue from the App Store.

The conflict, which is not worth a damn, has flared up due to the fact that each of the companies evaluates monthly indicators differently. App Annie compares the indicators of each month with each other, and Apple compares the total annual results. 

Because of this, according to App Annie, it turned out that the App Store’s revenue growth in October compared to January turned out to be small – only 12.9%, but according to Apple, the platform’s earnings have increased by more than 200% over the past eight months. 

That is, the first one took the results of the App Store in January 2012 for 100%, looked at the results of October and concluded that the growth was 12.9%. In turn, the Apple company calculated the total profit for the entire period from the beginning of the year, compared it with the total profit of the whole of 2011 and received 200%. 

Yes, the growth rate of Google Play, according to App Annie, was an impressive 311% (looks cooler than 12.9%, right?). The funny thing is that despite such an amazing difference in profit between January and October, the profit of the Android market still turned out to be 4 times less than that of the App Store, since the indicators with which they were compared were very low (about 10% of the profit of the Apple store at that time).