App Downloads: Apple Reaches 50 Billion, Google Play 48 Billion

At the Google I/O keynote this morning, Google announced that Google Play had seen 48 billion app downloads. This was on the heels of the announcement that there were 900 million Android device activations since inception.

Later in the day at roughly 5 pm US Eastern time, Apple said that its App Store saw its 50 billionth app download. This had been long anticipated. And, it’s quite a milestone. However, Google partly stole Apple’s thunder with its own announcement of nearly the same number of downloads earlier in the day.

This afternoon, the following image appeared on Apple‘s homepage:

Consumers spend about 80 percent of their time on mobile devices with apps and about 20 percent with the mobile Web, according to both Nielsen and comScore. Google was initially skeptical of apps and biased toward the mobile Web but quickly jumped on the “appwagon” and embraced the phenomenon.

Still, Google’s Chrome and Android boss Sundar Pichai spoke at length during the keynote about continuing to develop the Web and the mobile Web, in particular. Regardless, Google has now all but erased any app-related advantage that Apple’s iOS once held over Android.