A new analysis of app prices from market research firm Canalys calls out Android Apps as being 2.5-times more expensive than iOS apps on average. By gathering the current costs of all the top 100 apps on both platforms, Canalys felt confident enough to decree Android users are paying “dramatically higher” prices for apps. However, a brief look at Canalys’ methods paints a different picture — one of spin and misinterpretation.
On the face of it, the numbers are jarring enough to set an Android acolyte’s teeth on edge. The average price of Android apps in the survey was a whopping $3.74 among the top 100, but just $1.47 for iOS. When the analysis was limited to just the top 20 app on each platform, the difference reported by Canalys was even more stark; $4.09 average for Android, and $1.04 on iOS.
Digging just a little bit makes it clear what Canalys is doing; they’re using bad statistics to come to an invalid conclusion. The question to be answered here is, “what price are you likely to pay for an app on each platform?” In statistics, we call this the central tendency, and if that is indeed what you want to know, using the mean (or average) is the worst way to do so for this data set. Calculations of averages are least accurate among small data sets with high variability, for example outliers.
Android’s top apps are, for the most part, very cheap. Prices are commonly $0.99 or $1.99, but because enthusiast users are some of the biggest spenders, we see a smattering of root-only toolkits, office/email suites, and security applications. It is these apps that are expensive, with the office tools clocking in at $15-20 each, that produces the big numbers in Canalys’ data. Just a few outliers in the data set wildly changes the average, meaning it is not representative of what apps actually cost. Canalys also asserts that developers have increased prices on Android because it is harder to get users to buy apps, and they need the additional revenue. This is counterintuitive, seeing as users are less likely to buy apps they think are overpriced. The idea that iOS apps are cheaper because of in-app purchases is also off base. A huge number of Android apps use in-app purchases; it just happens that many of them are free.
EA’s higher Android pricing on a few games is used as evidence of Canalys’ claims, but one developer does not make a trend. At any rate, that one disparity doesn’t account for the vastly different averages. There is only an overlap of 19 apps in the top 100 of both platforms, and almost all of them are the same price on both Android and iOS. In fact, there are a few top iOS apps that are free on Android. To compare prices between platforms and draw conclusions about price competitiveness, you should only be looking at identical apps.
This analysis does not, in any way, show that Android apps are 2.5-times more expensive than iOS apps. All this data can illustrate is that there are a few Android apps that are quite expensive, and also happen to be popular. The use of an average price is misleading; a more accurate number would have been the median (the middle value in the data), or the mode (the most common price). The deals Android users get on apps are as good, or better than those on iOS.
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