Five years ago, Apple sparked a mobile-software boom by popularizing the term “app”. But now Google has diminishing one of the iPhone’s big selling points, the smartphone applications.
According to market researcher App Annie, while Apple’s revenue showed a climb of only 20 percent, sales of applications from Google’s online store was reported to be double in the fourth quarter from the prior three months. Some software firms like Ngmoco, which traditionally wrote programs for Apple before Google, have positioned both operating systems on same level. Interestingly, in some cases they are developing for Google first.
For a long time, Apple was the biggest smartphone maker and its mobile operating system was the most extensively used. It was all because it was a prominent leader in downloadable games, magazines and productivity tools. But then in 2010, it fell behind in software to Google’s Android and lost the top hardware position to Samsung Electronics last year.
For years Google trailed behind Apple in terms of number of apps available. But last year it caught up and in October its Google Play featured 700,000 applications, as many as Apple boasted that month.
Clive Downie, chief executive officer of the Ngmoco unit at DeNA Co., which bought the apps maker in 2010, said, “It’s growing exponentially – we’ve seen an inflection point the past six months.”
“We treat Android and Apple the same. They are equal partners to us, and we put equal amounts of resources toward both platforms.”
Google’s rise is visible in the companies’ share prices. It closed at a record high on last Friday, while Apple’s stock has fallen 37 percent since last September. Apple is trading at a 55 percent discount to Google on a price-to-earnings basis. This is said to be the most extensive development since July 2006, about a year before the iPhone got introduced.
In this $260 billion global smartphone market, three of four handsets sold are powered by Google’s Android operating system. To make the most of this situation, Google has been making it easier for programmers to build apps beside making it simpler for users to find and purchase them.
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