Entirely separate from the Android market statistics that Google provides in the Developer Console, AppBrain has a statistics section of its own.  Android developers can mine this source for ideas when fine tuning their revenue strategy.

There are a number of statistics sections on AppBrain:

You can peruse these pages on your own, but here are a few thoughts on the sections.

Free versus paid apps

The number of free vs. paid apps in the Android market (as of this writing) is 133528 vs. 83373, or 61.6% free apps.  Well, that’s not too surprising.  The Android market has long been reported to have a high percentage of free apps, one thing that differentiates it from some of the other platforms.  What about the actual price breakdown though?

Link to Pricing chart

There are some surprising tidbits here.  Do you see that the $2.50-$5.00 bracket shows a much higher number of apps in the 500-5000 download category than any of the other sections?  That’s certainly interesting.  It might be useful information to consider when pricing a new app.

Top categories

This is definitely a useful page.  When working on a new Android app concept, do you you want to know how users behave towards similar apps?  It shouldn’t surprise you that entertainment (e.g. games) has the highest popularity, nor that free apps dominate.  You might not have known, however that personalization falls directly behind it, and is mostly comprised of paid apps.

Link to categories chart

Moving down, you can see breakdowns for each category showing the percentage of high downloads (over 50k) and low quality (low ratings).  This might be relevant to help you understand the type and level of competition in the different categories for Android apps and games.

It appears that the books section, while having a high percentage of paid applications, also has the highest percentage of low quality apps. Games, unsurprisingly, show higher numbers of high download apps across all categories.

When looking to price your new paid Android app, check here to see what apps are going for in your category. For example, medical apps can command a far higher price than personalization apps.  This doesn’t take the place of checking for more targeted competition when pricing your app, but it can help you see the big picture at a glance.

Top search terms

While it would be difficult to create apps specifically to target the most recent search terms, you can target the keywords in your listing text.

I’m not sure how useful that strategy would be, as only the top few searches are shown.  If your subject is included, it will be helpful.  If not, it won’t give you any useful information.

A cause to change strategies?

Would you change your app strategies based on what you see here in the statistics?  Would it help you choose a price or even a category to create apps for?  Leave a comment if you have used these kind of statistics to help you make decisions about your Android apps.