At Last! App Store Analytics Firm App Annie Adds Support For Google Play

App Annie, the app store analytics and market intelligence firm popular among both app publishers and V.C.’s alike, is rolling out a hotly anticipated new feature today: support for Google Play (aka the Android Market). Google Play is now the fourth platform to be supported App Annie’s service, which already tracks iPhone, iPad and Mac applications and app store trends.

As with iOS and Mac, both free and premium product suites will be available for publishers interested in Google Play analytics. And there are a good many who are, given Android’s global distribution.

Today, 50% of the top 20 iOS publishers are App Annie customers, as well as 80% of the top 100. In total, App Annie has more than 100,000 apps and 13,000 publishers using its service, the company says. Many of these publishers are already the makers of cross-platform apps, so they will immediately benefit from the additional insight, if they hadn’t already been invited into the Google Play beta, that is.

The Google Play Suite

The new suite includes the following three products: Analytics for Google Play, Store Stats for Google Play and Intelligence for Google Play. These are very much like the offerings App Annie provides for iOS and Mac platforms now, which allow developers to track downloads, revenues, ranking, reviews, featured placements, and international breakdowns for their own apps as well as offering competitive analysis and Google Play app store trends, rankings, and other breakdowns.

The new Android analytics aren’t just useful because of the convenience factor of having everything in one dashboard view, they’re also helping developers gain access to international data, which has been a big pain point for the platform (among other things).

As Oliver Lo, VP Marketing for App annie, explains, “if you’re a developer, and you want to get a global view of the rankings for Google Play…if you go to their site, and your computer is in the U.S., you can only see the Google Play U.S. store. That creates a massive barrier for developers to just get hold of international data,” he says. “The technology we’ve built aggregates the rankings from the 35 countries across the Google Play store and puts it all in one place on one site that’s free for anyone to use.”

In the premium tier, developers will also have access to daily email reports that detail their download and revenue statistics, as well as things like where the app has been featured in international app store markets and what its ranking is. In the future, the plan is to increase the granularity of these reports beyond daily, Lo says.

Google Play Stats

To celebrate its Google Play launch, App Annie pulled out some interesting trends related to Google Play and iOS. For example, says CEO Bertrand Schmitt, iOS was responsible for 71% of app developers’ revenue worldwide, while Google Play accounted for just 29%. “It’s a pretty sizable difference between the two,” he says. “And if we look at the growth rate of these two platform over the last four months, we have been growing at 14%…it’s not as if Google is growing faster. So, in the short-term, we don’t see a big change in terms of revenue share,” he concludes.

Schmitt also said that while the U.S. was the top market in terms of downloads for both iOS and Android applications, the #2 and #3 position varied, depending on platform. For iOS, it was China and Japan, but Android was bigger in the U.K. and Germany. “The Chinese market has a lot of older, competitive app stores and Google Play is not readily available by default on Android handsets” says Schmitt, “and we don’t see that changing at all in the short-term.”

As for revenue, Schmitt adds that the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. accounted for 60% of app revenue for each platform (iOS and Google Play). Developers looking to go international should start with those countries first, and ideally the U.K.which is easier because of language. Note that App Annie is looking specifically at Google Play here, not Android as a whole. It’s not counting Amazon Appstore data, for example, although the plan is to launch that later this year, Schmitt says.

The new Google Play Android service is available from here: http://www.appannie.com/androidlaunch.