Top brands favour iOS for their apps

Stephen Withers
Friday, 28 October 2011 10:10

Your IT - Mobility

An analysis by Distimo shows the world's top brands still favour iOS over Android for their apps. But that may be about to change.

91 out of the world's top 100 brands (as ranked by Interbrand) are present in at least one app store, and Apple's App Store for iPhone is the top choice: 86 of the top brands are represented by iPhone apps and 66 by iPad apps.  59 are present in the Android Market, leaving the other app stores - Amazon Appstore, Mac App Store, BlackBerry World, GetJar, Nokia Ovi Store and Windows Phone 7 marketplace - in the dust.

They are some of the key findings in a new report from Distimo [registration required].

But where the growth in top brand presence in the App Store is flattening out during 2011, it is still strong in the Android Market. That makes sense on two counts: Android hardware sales have been growing; and the closer any store gets to including all the top 100 brands, the slower brand presence is likely to grow.

Distimo's analysis showed that the top 10 brands published or licensed more apps than any other decile, although this is skewed by Disney's 628 apps across all stores. Similarly, the presence of brands in 31st to 40th places was skewed by Sony's 281 apps.

The next three most active brands were BMW, MTV and Cisco.

In most cases, top brands give away their apps. Only 27 (with 32% of the apps) gain revenue from app stores. They include Disney, Adobe, and Thomson Reuters. That makes sense: Disney and Thomson Reuters are content providers, and Adobe is a software company.

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