Eric Johnson

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Google Play Had More App Downloads in Q2 Than iOS, but the Money Is Still on Apple’s Side

kidneys2In Q2 2013, Google Play racked up 10 percent more downloads than did Apple’s App Store, but iOS games still monetized more than twice as well as their Googley counterparts.

That’s according to analytics firm App Annie, which today released a mobile Q2 market report, as well as a June version of its normal monthly reports on games and all other apps. The factoid above isn’t too much of a surprise on its own — the increasing volume of Android devices on the market made it all but inevitable this year — but it’s indicative of how fast Google’s operating system is growing.

In Q1 of this year, App Annie tallied Google Play downloads as 90 percent of those on iOS, with Apple monetizing 2.6x as well as Google. Why did one number change so much more drastically than the other? The credit goes to “strong performances in India and Brazil,” the report’s writers say, as those two countries and Russia now generate the most downloads on Google Play.

Also of note in the June games report are two newcomers on the iOS top-downloaded chart, even though the top-grossing rankings are effectively unchanged since the month before. Chinese studio Man Zhang, which made the guessing game Hi Guess the Brand, leapfrogged over Rovio, Zynga and more than 1,000 other developers to finish the month at No. 6.

Meanwhile, Metro Trains Melbourne — which made the viral video “Dumb Ways to Die” and a surprisingly fun spinoff game — also beat out both Rovio and Zynga, which fell by six and five places in the chart, respectively. It may have racked up 55 million views on YouTube, but for all both of our readers who haven’t seen it, here’s that wonderful video again:

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”