Google Play revenue up by over 300 per cent

Google Play has seen business boom this year with a 311 per cent rise in revenue, but the Android app store still has a long way to go before catching up with Apple's iOS App Store.

Those are the findings of a new report by app store analytics and market intelligence firm App Annie, which examined revenues from January to October this year.

As the report points out, the high growth figures are helped by the fact revenue figures for Google Play weren't very strong at the start of the year, while Apple was making 12 times as much revenue.

Nonetheless, the over 300 per cent rise in revenue for Google Play compares to 13 per cent in the same period for the Apple App Store.

The number of downloads via Android smartphones and tablets is also growing, with 48 per cent more downloads in October than in May.

The increasing revenue for the Play store coincides with the increasing use of Android devices, with three quarters of all smartphones sold now running on Google's operating system. Tablets running on Android have also become more popular, with their share of the market increasing at the expense of Apple's iPad.

The report also found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the US is the nation that downloads the most apps, accounting for 26 per cent of all iOS downloads and 21 per cent of Android. However, for the first time the US isn't the number one country for revenue on the Google Play store, with Japan accounting for 29 per cent of Android app revenue compared to America's 26 per cent.

In all areas of the world, it is mobile games that account for the largest revenue from apps, with nine of the top 10 publishers of apps on both iOS and Google being game publishers.

The App Annie analysis comes from tracking analytics of more than 150,000 apps across the 10-month study period.