For the money part, https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/

iOS is 15% of the mobile device market but generates 67% of the app revenue.

Yeah, I suppose this stuff isn't common-knowledge outside the commercial mobile development space.

There are complaints in this very thread about how shit the software selection is on the Play Store compared with iOS. This is why. Companies that have to, for whatever reason, pick only one platform to start on, usually pick iOS. If they add on Android later, they expect it not to make as much money as the iOS app, so may half-ass the port. In some cases, good apps that have enough revenue to keep them alive on iOS, may judge that an Android port won't be worth the added cost (especially smaller apps—think, one or two developer sorts of operations, they may run the numbers and project only a 20% revenue boost from adding an Android port, which may not be enough to cover the dev, testing, administrative, and support time the platform would require). There's a perception that, basically, Android users won't buy apps (which is... kinda true) and that's why the iOS version of an app might be ad-free and paid, while Android only gets an ad-supported variant—the vendor doesn't think creating and supporting a paid option on Android is worth the extra overhead.

I used to be a mobile developer, and I literally got death threats for charging $6 on Android. People just paid it on iOS and got on with using the app.

Also 85% of all the profit in the entire global smartphone market. [1] Roughly speaking nobody makes profit in smartphones other than Tim.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-03/iphone-gr...

iOS users spend more than Android users, and are even becoming the majority in the US. Here's some citation: https://nix-united.com/blog/are-android-vs-ios-users-really-...

Spend more, and use their devices a lot more, both Web and Apps. At least, last time I looked at market research data like this, which was admittedly 4-5 years ago.

Something that I think is often not considered when thinking about mobile device usage stats is the proportions of types of users the market is comprised of.

While I don't have any links to back the idea up, I suspect that Android's marketshare is somewhat inflated by users who'd normally be using feature phones — these users don't need anything more than the ability to make cell calls and maybe text occasionally, and even the absolute cheapest of cheap Android phones checks those boxes. There's no point in these users buying even a low-midrange Android phone, let alone a flagship or an iPhone. So while these users are technically Android users, they're not really smartphone users.

Also, the difference in rates of usage extends beyond phones. I think I read some of the same reports you did and compared to iPads, Android tablets are much more likely to end up forgotten in a drawer or collecting dust on a shelf. Having a recent low-midrange Android tablet myself (for Android app dev purposes) I would guess that this is at least partially due to how ridiculously low-spec cheap Android tablets are… mine cost almost as much as a refurbished iPad 9th gen on sale but doesn't perform a fraction as well as that model of iPad. Even my old Pixel 3XL runs circles around it.

Agree with the user base portions. My parents (in their 80's) each have 3 android phones because my dad keeps buying them for some reason. We never know which of their phones/features are currently active. My mom wasn't getting my texts and we just figured out that she doesn't have texting enabled. Not sure if it's a setting or that my dad picked a 90 day phone plan without text support. :-)

As someone used Android and Apple co-currently, this is it. Android apps I supported (camera and photo apps, some music) all went down in some form and were gone in some time. Furthermore, the quality was always lower than any iOS counterparts.

Apple apps almost never have these problems and are higher quality.