Apps: Selection vs. Control
While the iPhone App Store offers slightly fewer apps than Google Play—around 1,3000,000 vs. 1,500,000 (as of Sept. 2014)—overall selection isn’t the only factor. Apple is famously strict (some might say unpredictable) about what apps it allows and how it changes its policies, while Google’s standards for Android are somewhat more lax.
Many developers have complained about the emphasis on free apps for Android and the difficulty of developing for so many different phones. This fragmentation—the large numbers of devices and OS versions to support—makes developing for Android expensive (for instance, the developers of Temple Run reported that early in their Android experience nearly all of their support emails had to do with unsupported devices—but they support over 700 Android phones!).
Combine these development costs with an emphasis on free that reduces the likelihood that developers can cover their costs and not all of the best apps make it to Android, and those that do don’t necessarily run on all phones. Key apps also almost always debut first on iOS, with Android versions coming later, if at all.
Winner: Apple