Medialets

Google’s Android Market has been officially live for 24 hours. Here are some early observations and comparisons with the iPhone App Store’s first 24 hours.

There are myriad similarities between iPhone and Android users:

• They like to play games, shop, and know what music they are listening to,
• They are curious about the weather, and
• They generally share the same interests as iPhone users 

During the first 24 hours of Android Market, 62 apps were available to consumers, all free.  This is less than 10% of the number of apps we saw at the launch of Apple’s App Store. Although Apple allowed both free and paid applications to be distributed when the App Store launched, paid downloads for Android will not be available until Q1 2009.

Observation #1 - The average application has 7,800+ downloads.

Android Market is providing some detail on downloads per application -  in contrast to Apple’s embargo of this information after the first 15 hours of launching their App Store.  Rather than displaying exact figures, Android phones show download ranges for a given application, with the smallest range we observed being 100-500 and the largest 10,000-50,000. Given those ranges, roughly 206,000 to 770,000 downloads occurred within the first 24 hours of launch. The weighted average of midpoints is 7,850 downloads/app, just north of the middle of the 5,000 - 10,000 range.

Observation #2  - Nine apps made it to the 10,000 - 50,000 downloads range.

If we use ratings and number of reviews to differentiate, unlike the iPhone platform, games are not in the top three.  Of the nine apps in this range, only three are games.  ShopSavvy is at the top of the list factoring in ratings and number of reviews, followed by The Weather Channel, and Shazam, an app that helps people identify a song they are listening to.  During the early hours of the iPhone App Store, while Apple was still publishing download data, only two apps broke the 10,000 download mark - Remote and AIM.  Remote, the leading app, was downloaded ~16,000 times. Although the ranges for the top Android apps are similar, it is still too early  to assert with confidence that a trajectory similar to Apple’s App Store is occurring.  Other factors over time need to be considered, including the total number of apps in the market.

Observation #3 - 24 hours into the launch, it appears that either Android users are generally interested in the same types of application functionality as iPhone users, or possibly, that Android developers are generally interested in creating the same types of apps as iPhone developers.

We compared our observations of the iPhone App Store 24 hours after launch with Android Market, and found that once we normalized the names of categories between the two platforms, the categories have similar distributions of applications. We had to make some assumptions and groupings to make our best apples-to-androids comparison and noted those in the table below the chart.

As always, we love hearing from anyone who is interested in learning more about, or sharing their experiences about this new platform. Feel free to contact us at connect at www.medialets.com or follow us on twitter at @medialets.

We would love to see you there! We’ve heard from our friends Matt Drance and Michael Jurewitz at Apple that the event in our hometown of New York is already at capacity, but you can sign up to be on the waitlist.  Here’s the complete list of their destinations: 

Be sure to sign up ASAP, and leave us a comment if you’re planning on attending!

Great news out of Cupertino today for Apple iPhone developers worldwide: Apple has dropped its NDA. 

Prior to today, the NDA, which must be agreed to before the SDK can be downloaded, had prevented programmers from discussing the finer points of their code and had forbidden developers from discussing the SDK and the applications that are built upon it.

Apple’s Nondisclosure Agreement, which has caused plenty of heartache for iPhone developers, also has prevented many experts from sharing their experiences, asking questions, and providing guidance.  

Here at Medialets, we pride ourselves on being a hub for innovation and insights into this new platform, but have not been allowed to share much of the data and learnings we have accumulated over the past 81 days.

Over the next few days, we will be compiling some of our best practices and code examples onto developer.medialets.com/forum.  We are also organizing some workshops for developers in NYC and SF who are looking to create great apps and successful businesses around the platform.

Please feel free to reach out to us at any time with your ideas, comments, suggestions and questions. Reach us at  connect at medialets dot com or follow us on Twitter at @medialets.  Happy coding!

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research last week published some interesting statistics on the sale of the first 1 Million 3G iPhones.  We took a quick look and made some observations.

It’s a typical power curve, with 4 of the 22 countries capturing 81% of unit sales. The US leads with 600,000 units sold followed by Japan, Germany and France each with about 70,000 units.  

If you look at the percentage of each carrier’s contract subscriber base in each country, with the exception of the US, it looks as if all countries have a very consistent penetration rate of ~ 0.4% except Canada, whose anemic penetration rate and units sold are most likely a result of the systems issues that Apple and many carriers were having during registration of the handsets.

From a global carrier perspective, removing AT&T from the pack, it looks like T-Mobile is the leader for overseas unit sales, reporting 89,000 units sold in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Orange is next with combined unit sales of 77,000 from France, Belgium and Switzerland. Japan’s Softbank is third with 70,000 units sold.

Of course this data only spans the very frothy first three days.  We are looking forward to learning more about results over the last 2+ weeks and will keep you posted as more data comes in.  Let us know if you hear anything else, and a big thanks to our developer community for continuing to keep the quest for transparency a top commercial priority.

Who doesn’t love a good old fashioned camping trip, even if it *is* in the concrete jungle of NYC?  Hundreds of our fellow iPhone lovers braved heat, humidity, and a few attention-seeking hecklers to get their hands on the coveted device right at 8am.  To celebrate the developers we love so much, we brought our favorite part of camping to the 5th Avenue Apple Store: s’mores!

We passed out over 200 Medialets s’more kits, each containing bamboo-skewered jet puffed marshmallows, rich dark chocolate bars, graham crackers, a tealight candle and matches.  The response was fabulous!  iPhone fans all around were roasting jumbo marshmellows while they waited.  Special thanks to our friends at CNET/CBS Justin Yu and Wilson Tang for making the day so memorable and making us laugh.  
Also, to Chrissie Brodigan, Tony Bacigalupo, Brett Petersel, Michael Gruen, David Riordan and DeeDee Stanbury, we cannot thank you enough for your support in making this event possible.  Thank you so much!

Photos courtesy of Tony Bacigalupo’s Flickr. 

Eric being interviewed on CNET

Eric’s business card

Greg Gregarious Narain from Blue Whale Labs and Adam Hirsch from Mashable