The Android ecosystem through the eyes of analysts

The analytical company AppBrain recently published statistics on the ecosystem of the Android platform. The report shows quantitative indicators of app downloads per month, their popularity by category and the top Android smartphones.

In five years, more than 700 thousand applications have been downloaded to the Google Play app store. As of November 7, 557,631 applications are now available on the market, minus deleted ones. Of these 550 thousand, 26%, that is, almost 150 thousand applications, are, according to AppBrain analysts, low-quality content. Six months ago, low–quality applications were counted one and a half times less – about 100 thousand.

How the analysts assessed the quality of the content is not entirely clear. Perhaps by rating and user ratings.

Quantitative indicators of application downloads in the store are uneven monthly. They were minimal in December 2011 (about 13 thousand) and in August 2012 (about 8 thousand applications in total). And just after the seasonal downturns, a record number of new applications were observed in the market: about 28 thousand applications were downloaded in February and September. 

Among the most popular categories of applications, AppBrain identifies the category of entertainment (as a rule, it consists of free applications), personalization, the category of books and reference information, as well as the category of tools.

As for the popularity of a particular version of the operating system, the AppBrain data is slightly different from the official ones published by Google a couple of days ago. The main share of Android devices is still running on Gingerbread, but, according to analysts, its share is 43%, not 54.2%. The popularity of Ice Cream Sandwich is gaining more than stated – 33% instead of 25.8%. The latest version of Android Jelly Bean 4.1 instead of the 2.7% measured by Google according to the AppBrain version takes a share of 9%. 

The analytical company also calculated the rating of Android-based smartphones. Only 2 manufacturers got into it: Samsung (8 positions out of 10) and HTC. Samsung Galaxy S III and S II have earned a special love of users.