It's been a strong possibility for some time now but the Android Market looks like it'll finally overtake Apple's mighty App Store by August 2011.
The culmination of the decelerating growth on Apple's App Store paired with the Android Market's growth still tenaciously accelerating, have meant that analysts have been able to predict this monumental shift.
App store analytics company Distimo were one of the first groups to predict the Android Market's overtake with another organisation, Germany-based research2guidance having information that complemented the original research stating that Android Market will overtake the App Store by August 2011, assuming it hits its target of 425,000 new apps by the start of the month. In April 2011, Android Market added 28,000 new applications to its ranks, whereas Apple's App Store only managed a comparatively small 11,000.
This is good news for Google in terms of offering a greater choice, but in the grand scheme of things, just how much does this affect anything? The majority of the apps on both stores go unnoticed with the 'cream usually rising to the top', quickly. And having the store with the most available apps does not mean the majority revenue, especially for developers. The research conducted by research2guidance actually discounts this and sways towards the opposite, the idea that; "success of an app store is negatively correlated to the success of an average developer. All analysis on the early months of an app store including the Android Market shows that average download numbers decrease dramatically after the first months or even weeks after the launch of the store. The long tail gets longer and longer while the top 5% gets richer and richer."
Also, one might argue that the majority of apps between both stores are geared toward different users. iOS and its apps, aimed at a premium market and as such, charge a premium for their services with Android going for a more mass-market approach.
