Edible Apple

Steve Jobs was overly thrilled when he announced during his WWDC keynote a few weeks back that Apple has paid out a whopping $1 billion dollars to developers since the app store first opened in July of 2008. If you’re keeping score at home, that translates into $1.42 billion in revenue before Apple takes its 30% cut.

In any event, with competing app stores now sprouting up left and right, a popular way to measure the popularity of various app stores is to measure the total number of apps. And while instructive, such a comparison is by no means definitive. But with Apple for the first time announcing how much they’ve paid out to developers, we now have another metric at our disposal, and the folks over at Larva Labs decided to take that nugget of info and run with it.

Here’s how they estimated how much the Android Marketplace has paid out to developers:

It is possible to get a reasonably good estimate of the amount of money paid out to developers on Android, as the range of sales is presented for each app in the market (ie. “1000-5000 downloads”). Using this as well some random sampling techniques, we are able to get an estimate that we think is accurate within a range of about 20%. However, we generally over-estimated numbers so as to be conservative in our comparison with the iTunes Store.

Their results? They estimate that Android has paid out approximately $21 million to developers, “almost 50x lower than the amount paid out to devs on [the] iPhone”