Study: Chinese Android Users Download Very Few New Apps. Study = Rubbish

A new study by Research2Guidance shows that Swedish Android smartphone users download the most new apps every month, while Chinese Android lovers download the least – not even at the rate of one app per month. Trouble is, that stat for China is, to use my British vernacular, total bollocks.

In its ‘apps per user per month’ study (the graph is below), the analysts looked only at Google’s (NASQAQ:GOOG) official app store, the Android Market. But, being tied to a Gmail address and lacking paid apps support in China, few people actually use it here in China. And so Research2Guidance is looking in the wrong place.

There are over 70 alternative Android app stores in China – and that’s where Chinese Android users go for new apps. Yes, it’s quite fragmented and messy, but it works just fine. In theory, a user here needs to install only one third-party app store – say, the Innovation Works-backed App China (pictured top), or the fast-growing EOE Market – and they’re all set for a whole host of free and freemium apps.

Thankfully, most developers realise this, and I often get emails from people asking which stores to upload to, or which distribution channels to sign-up for. Some go to the effort of making a paid app into a free one – such as EA Mobile with a handful of its iOS apps for China – with extra advertising or a sponsorship deal of some sort. So long as the devs still get ad revenue from their apps, and some decent metrics and feedback from those alternative stores, then Google’s official offering is irrelevant to success in China.

As for how many apps Chinese Android users actually install per month – well, that’s hard to figure out, across all those unofficial sources. But I think it’s safe to say that it’s more than that graph shows.

I’m sure the study makes more sense for the other countries, so long as residents there do actually use the original Market; here’s the full thing from Research2Guidance.