Does The Amazon Appstore Really Generate 3 Times The Revenue Of Google Play?

Flurry

Flurry released new data today suggesting that for every $1.00 a developer makes on the iTunes App Store, it makes $0.89 on the Amazon Appstore and $0.23 on Google Play (Android Market). Sounds great for Amazon! And the tech community is already spreading the word, saying just how much sense this makes given the success of Kindle Fire and Amazon's vast experience at selling people stuff.

But how much does the report actually tell us?

Not a lot.

It tells us that they've looked at the revenue generated by apps that are available on all three platforms. But where did they get this information? And how do they make the comparison? Do the companies that make these apps share their revenue figures with Flurry? Or do they estimate based on the publicly available download figures?

We don't know.

We also don't know how they draw the comparison. For example, Angry Birds for iOS is $0.99 but it's free on Android. In this case, do we assume that for every dollar Rovio (maker of Angry Birds) generates in iTunes they generate $0.00 on Android? I really hope not, because that would be absurd.

The bottom line is that we just don't know, because the report did not reveal how the data was collected and from what sources. Instead, we are left taking their word for it.