Despite Android's growing market share, Apple users continue to spend twice as much money on apps as Android users

It often comes as a surprise that, given Android's lion share of the market, app developers generally choose iOS as the platform to build for.

Android provides clearer guidelines, more documentation, and allows more flexibility in terms of design. On top of that, Android devices accounted for more than 85% of 2017 global smartphone sales while iOS was in a distant second at 14%.

But in addition to being less fragmented with its single platform, Apple makes developers a lot of money because its users are more likely to make in-app and App Store purchases compared to Android users, according to data from App Annie. As this chart from Statista shows, even as Android claims more and more of the global app downloads, its share of the dollars spent remains almost the same.

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For the last five years, Android users have downloaded more apps than Apple users, but spent nearly half as many dollars.

Shayanne Gal/Business Insider