In app marketplace, Google works hard, plays hard

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Mass stay-at-home orders in 2020 had virtual stores bursting with business—consumers downloaded apps 143 billion times from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

  • App Store downloads made up only about a quarter of these downloads, which makes sense because for one, Androids outnumber iPhones globally—in 2019, just 13% of smartphones shipped worldwide were iPhones.
  • If one app were downloaded somewhere on Earth every second, it would take 4,531 years to download all the apps downloaded from the two stores last year—fortunately, multiple people can download apps at the same time.

"Behind the Numbers" Podcast