Case Study: Android Surge

June 27, 2011
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WRITTEN BY
June 27, 2011

Kelly Chu

This year we put an empha­sis on Android. First with the Pic­tur­izr Android ver­sion launched in March, which saw a 5x increase in user traf­fic over iOS. Sec­ond, we launched FaceS­mash for Android in May and saw a 3x increase in user traf­fic. We attribute the surge in traf­fic due to Android now hav­ing a larg­er user pen­e­tra­tion over iOS as well as the large young demo­graph­ic that have Android smart­phones over iOS devices.
Over the last 30 days our Pic­tur­izr app has been used a quar­ter mil­lion times. From that audi­ence we have tracked 367 dif­fer­ent Android Phone Mod­els from 44 dif­fer­ent hard­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers world­wide. Among all of the dif­fer­ent Android Mod­els we have quite a spread as there aren’t any sin­gle dom­i­nat­ing Android Phone Mod­el cur­rent­ly in the mar­ket. Of the 44 dif­fer­ent hard­ware man­u­fac­tures Sam­sung, HTC, LG, Motoro­la, and Huawei are the top 5. Over time we have seen the amount of dif­fer­ent Android Phone Mod­els increase and we expect this trend to keep occur­ring as man­u­fac­tures com­pete in the hard­ware mar­ket. The clear win­ner here is Google with every con­sumer elec­tron­ics brand look­ing to build the next inter­net con­nect­ed device run­ning Google’s OS. Apple on the oth­er hand with its cur­rent­ly lim­it­ed device mod­els and lim­it­ed car­ri­er part­ner­ships has fall­en short of com­pet­ing with Google on the mobile device mar­ket share.
In terms of app usage over the last 30 days we had 30% users using iOS while 70% using Android devices. Among our users we are see­ing Android users return­ing 56% more times then iOS users. The amount of feed­back we have received after launch­ing Pic­tur­izr Android and FaceS­mash Android has been phe­nom­e­nal. We’ve also seen a 25% increase in iOS down­load and app usage increase since our Android launch like­ly due to the viral nature of the 2 apps insti­gat­ing friends and fam­i­ly to down­load the app onto their device. Thus mak­ing the case for brands to at the least launch across iOS and Android to max­i­mize user acquisition.
Addi­tion­al Analy­sis showed that Android users are less like­ly to pur­chase apps com­pared to iOS users. How­ev­er, once down­loaded Android and iOS users are equal­ly like­ly to per­form in-app pur­chas­es. We com­pared the same rate of down­load and in-app pur­chas­es over time across both oper­at­ing sys­tems. From this analy­sis we would rec­om­mend brands to launch apps for free to and to mon­e­tize via in-app pur­chas­es across both iOS and Android. This approach will max­i­mize user acqui­si­tion and paid user conversion.
For addi­tion­al inquiry about our research above please con­tact research@isbx.com
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