Profitable App Profiles for App Store and Google Play
This project explores what types of free apps are likely to attract more users on Google Play and the App Store.
Data used
Android data set containing
data about approximately 10,000 Android apps from Google Play, collected in August 2018.
iOS data set containing data about approximately 7,000 iOS apps from the App Store,
collected in July 2017.
Data Overview
Android header and data
We can see that the Google Play data set has 10,841 apps and 13 columns.
The columns that may be useful for analysis are App, Category, Rating, Reviews, Installs, Type, Price and Genres
iOS header and data
We can see that the iOS data set has 7,197 apps and 17 columns.
The columns that may be useful are track_name, currency, price, rating_count_tot, rating_count_ver, user_rating and prime_genre.
Data Cleaning
Deleting incorrect data
Removing Duplicate Entries
Duplicate apps mainly differ on the number of reviews (rating_count_tot for iOS and reviews for Android), suggesting that those with the highest review number were the most recent ones. Thus, we'll keep only the duplicate app with the highest rating.
Removing Non-English Apps
We use the Unicode number of the characters in the app name to make sure they are less than 127 characters. This should filter out any apps with characters that imply they're not directed at an English-speaking audience.
Isolate Free Apps
As a reminder, this project is analyzing apps that are free to download and install. We'll investigate later what this means for in-app revenue.
Data Analysis
Here, we'll be investigating the most common and popular apps by genre.
The end goal is to find an app profile that works well for both Google Play and the iOS App Store.
Most Common Apps by Genre
iOS Genres by Percentage
On the App Store, we can see that Games are the most common free, english-speaking apps by a wide margin at 58.32%. While the entertainment category is second at 7.84%, Games can technically be considered a subset of Entertainment. Thus, the general impression is that the majority of apps are designed for entertainment purposes as opposed to practical/educational purposes.
Android Genres by Percentage
Android Categories by Percentage
On Google Play, we can see that Tools- and Entertainment-related apps rank highly when considering the different Android genres and categories. This suggests a very different app profile from that we saw on the App Store.
Most Common Apps Analysis
We can't recommend an app profile for the App Store or the Google Play Store based on this information alone. The fact there's a large number of entertainment apps doesn't indicate that those apps also have the largest number of users. It does, however, reveal the most frequented genres.
Most Popular Apps by Genre
One way to find out what genres are the most popular is to calculate the average number of installs for each app genre. For the Google Play data set, this information
exists in the Installs
column. We don't have this information for the app store, so we'll use total number of user ratings as a proxy from the rating_count_tot
column.
iOS: Average number of ratings by genre
Navigation apps, while fewer, are rated the most highly. With fewer apps in a genre, it's reasonable to expect that those apps would be of higher ratings, but that people would be less likely to switch from the apps that they currently use.
It's also interesting to observe that while entertainment apps were the most frequent, practical apps are more highly rated.
Android: Average number of installs by genre
While the number of installs should provide is with a clearer picture of genre popularity, the install numbers themselves are not precise
Because we don't need precise data here, we'll assume that an app with 100,000+ installs has 100,000 installs and so on.
Android: Average number of installs by category
In Android's case, we can see that the Productivity category and the Communication genre has the most average installs. Entertainment apps as can be seen with the Arcade genre and the Game category are are not for behind.
Recommendation
App Store
For the App Store, the app profile I would thus recommend is one that is both frequent (meaning there is an opportunity for users to swtich) and highly rated. This leads me to recommend Social Networking or Music apps as a potential genre to develop an in.
Google Play
For Googe Play, the app profile I would recommend are communication apps which have a focus on productivity and ease-of-use. There are also enough apps in these categories such that users might switch if a better app was produced.
Cross Platform
From this analysis, it's reasonably clear that social apps would be well suited for both platforms.