On Android, they don't really like to play games

This is what experts from the analytical company Chomp insist on, who recently published the results of their own monitoring of the mobile application market for 2011.

According to their results, the number of game downloads on Android is decreasing. It is generally believed that gaming applications are the most popular on smartphones, but now this statement is true only in the case of iOS. In other words, while downloads of games on iTunes were growing, their number was decreasing on the Android Market. 

For example, in December 2011, 36% of downloads on iTunes were games, on Android the number of downloads was much less – 22% – and it was going down.

Also, according to the monitoring results, it became clear that the popularity of applications belonging to the Entertainment category (such as Netflix, Talking Tom, Crackle and Flixster) is growing on Android. 

At the same time, music and fitness apps have been growing in popularity on iTunes until recently. As for useful utilities, their popularity has been steadily falling over the past eight months on the iPhone and iPad of 2011. 

As for app prices, they were rising on iTunes, but falling on Android. The average price of an iOS app at the end of December was $0.67, as for the average price of Android Market apps, it dropped to $0.09.

But what’s interesting is that the average price for paid Android apps is higher than the price on the App Store – $ 3.17 versus $2.41. However, the number of paid applications on the mobile Google market is much less than that of a competitor: 5% vs. 22%

Also, analysts from Chomp shared their versions of the best applications for both platforms.

Thanks to this list, the difference between the audiences of competing platforms is visible: Android users are more interested in utilities (perhaps because the system is not perfect, and users are trying to “fix” it themselves), and owners of Apple products like to play and have fun.