Google’s App store has grown significantly and financial analyst, Citygroup’s Mark May, has predicted that the search engine giant will harvest $1.3 this year.
The analysis say that in this year there will be just over 900 million Android devices, and even though that Android consumers spend less on apps than their Apple counterparts (as believed), he still expects the average revenue per user to be about $4.59.
This collectively results to total revenues for Google Play of $4.2 billion, of which Google takes a 30 percent share which is about $1.3 billion, before its own hosting/management costs.
Mark further estimates that in the next four years, Google Play revenues will reach at least $17 billion, resulting in Google taking a slice of $5.2 billion from the sale of mobile apps.
Adding in the revenue from mobile advertising, then Google’s Android investment will pull in at least $7 billion a year by 2017.