Last Updated on September 13, 2024
Cellphone manufacturers can amaze people with their glossy and shiny phones backed with an amazing design and gadgetry, but without useful applications to support, they are just like hollow shells. Applications give brains to smart phones, and without them cellphones can be termed as dumb phones indeed. As we all are aware, despite of sleek design and nice hardware of its mobiles, one-time market leader Nokia lost its market share and incurred huge drop in sales of its smart phones.
All happened because it did not adopt the changes of the market and stayed loyal to its old Symbian and Windows OS. This lead to evolution of two biggies in the market — Apple iOS and Google Android. The war among the two major giants has taken another leap as Apple and Google have recently upgraded their operating systems, with iOS 6 and Android Jelly Bean (4.1.1) being into action now. So which platform is better and what are the various factors that effect their popularity? Check out here!
Round 1: The numbers game – apps count
As far as apps are concerned they play the most crucial role for any SmartPhone. Apple App store and Google Play both provides their customers with a plethora of applications to download. Where Apple Apps store provide approx. 650,000 applications with 225,000 apps for iPad, Google Play is not far behind with over 600,000 applications in its store.
Though Apple provides more applications than Google, but looking at the statistics from the past few years, we got to know that Google has significantly increased its number of apps whereas, iOS is lagging much behind Google in terms of pace. In terms of number of Downloads Apple is hands-down the winner, as till now the number of application downloads from the app store is around 30 Billion whereas, Google is far behind with only 20 billion downloads till date.
Round 2: Which OS gets the better search results
When it comes to search results we all have paramount expectations from Google, in contrast Google Play fails to perform in indexing the results properly and provides all junk results when one searches for any application. Like, if you search for “Angry birds” you also get junk results like Angry Birds live wallpapers, Angry Birds widgets, etc. Whereas Apple App Store is quite efficient in these terms as it generates generic results in a better manner and also has a powerful auto suggest feature to improve the usability.
Round 3: Talking about the apps submission, who is stricter?
If we talk about which among the two has a stricter policy for apps submission, Apple App Store hands down is a winner and is often termed as the “big brother” of developers because it has been known to reject Apps for some unusual reasons and to put first its own commercial interests. This is not the case with Google Play as it promotes fresh talents and creativity among developer base and promotes new applications extensively.
The Final Show-Down: User Interface
User interface plays a crucial role when we talk about an operating system. As far as Google Play and App Store are concerned both provide superb user interface for their application stores, but in terms of looks and usability Google Play scores better, for it has a sleek look and featured apps page (which provides link to all the new applications and games). Though Apple also provides a compelling interface, Google Play uses big and vibrant colored icons to display all new and featured apps, which is quite an eye-catching technique. This, however, is subjective – you might like beautiful icons and widgets, but for some they might be annoying.
Summing up
We cannot state which among App Store and Google Play is the winner as the fight is quite even and both the application stores are doing great in their respective domain. But as far as stats to be believed, Android is catching up at a really fast pace and iOS’ growth is little stagnant. Let’s watch out what wonders these giants come up with. We can now have a healthy discussion in the comments section below.
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