According to new research from mobile analytics service Mobilewalla, Sunday is the best day to release a mobile app, but Wednesday is the most popular day among developers. The company studied the apps released in the iTunes App Store and Android Market over a 17-week period between May 16th and September 8th, 2011, to determine its findings. During this time, there were 91,754 iOS apps released into the iTunes App Store and 122,220 apps released into the Android Market.
Yes, that’s a lot of apps! The company reported earlier in December that the app count rose to 987,863 across all four platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone) and is now growing at an average of 2,000 apps per day. In the last 12 months, iOS apps grew from 338,000 to 589,148. Android apps grew from 115,000 to 319,774.
During the 119 days of the study, Mobilewalla sorted apps by the day of the week they were released. However, it should be noted that on Android, developers control the release date, while iOS apps’ release dates are affected by the iTunes review cycle. So it may not be fair to proclaim Wednesday as developer’s “favorite” day universally, given that they’re not always in control of the release timeframe.
Even if Sunday was not always the developers’ chosen launch day, Mobilewalla found that apps released then statistically performed the best. That is, they made it into the list of the top 240 mobile applications. In this case, Mobilewalls is defining the “top 240” apps as those that achieve the highest ranking in their respective stores. 42% of the iOS apps released on a Sunday made it into the top 240, while 11% of Android apps did the same.
Meanwhile, Thursdays were the worst day to release apps on Android, as only 7% of apps reached the top 240 then. On iOS, Fridays were the worst, as only 10% of apps reached the top 240.
Although unrelated to trends regarding the best and worst days of the week to launch, the company stumbled upon a relatively sad finding during its research: an app on Apple’s platform is four times more likely to be discovered than an app on the Android Market. That speaks to the challenges Google still has to overcome in terms of its ability to better showcase the best new apps within its app store, perhaps.
Explains Anindya Datta, Ph.D., founder and chairman of Mobilewalla, “Apple users discover apps more conveniently than Android users. And while it is impossible to identify exact causes for this pattern, users may find it easier to browse items in the relatively low number of apps launched over the weekend.”