The key stat from Flurry’s research is a look at apps that are available in the iTunes App Store, Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market) and Amazon’s Appstore. Not surprisingly, the same app in all three stores makes more money — specifically through in-app purchases — in iTunes, so Flurry used this data as a baseline, setting iOS revenues to be 100%. It turns out that in this situation, Amazon Appstore revenues are 89 percent of iOS revenues, while Google Play yields only 23 percent.

Flurry puts it in dollar terms like this:

Another way to interpret the results is that for every $1.00 an app generates in the iTunes App Store, it generates $0.89 in the Amazon Appstore and $0.23 in Google Play.

These results illustrate two very important trends. First, it may make sense for developers writing Android apps to get them in Amazon’s store sooner rather than later. Second, it shows that making money on Android apps is possible; the same title can make almost as much money as its iOS counterpart. Granted, working with Amazon may not be ideal to some, given that Amazon can set the app price. But giving up that freedom may prove financially beneficial in the long run thanks to Amazon’s constant promotion of mobile apps.

I think that’s part of the success factor here for Amazon apps. For all intents and purposes, these titles are the same Android apps found in Google Play. Google isn’t known as a brand for digital media and apps, however. Instead, it’s commonly considered to be a search company first and everything else second.

Compare that to Amazon, which is a top retail brand around the world: Last year, Amazon’s brand value surpassed that of WalMart to take the top retail brand spot. This mindset, that Amazon is a safe place to purchase digital content — think e-books, music, and video — extends to apps and in-app purchases, even if they’re the same wares found in Google’s store. Clearly, consumers are comfortable with Apple’s brand and store too, so devs may want to focus on iOS and Amazon when it comes to mobile apps.

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It’s really just a straight name change: there are no new partners, products, services or other major changes to announce as far as Google’s relationships with app companies and content companies, said Chris Yerga, director of engineering for Android. But at some time over the next several weeks, Android users around the world will be prompted to replace the familiar “Market” icon on their devices with the “Play Store” icon as the primary vehicle for getting apps onto their devices. Web users of the Android Market will be redirected to play.google.com, where they will see a familiar design with subtle changes highlighting the array of content that Google offers through its storefront.

Google felt that it could improve the way it presented its content stores with the redesign and rebranding, Yerga said. Web surfers weren’t always aware that Google offered an array of content through the “Android” storefront, which is understandable if they weren’t also Android users.  And sometimes the experiences were jarring: for example, you would listen to your music library at Google Music but you would purchase music through the Android Market.

Google Play will remind some of Apple’s iTunes Store in terms of the way Google is presenting all of the digital content that it sells–apps, books, music, and movies–through a single store. But it’s almost like Google is de-emphasizing apps with this rebranding: Android users are pretty familiar with the Android Market as the home for apps, and changing the application store to a brand that doesn’t feature “Android” at all could be confusing for some at first.

This change will be required for any device maker or carrier who wants to offer apps through Google’s stores, and users will be required to sign into Google’s services in order to access the store. That means Kindle Fire users won’t be able to access the Play Store, although of course one of the main reasons Amazon built the Kindle Fire was to promote its own content offerings.

Google will allow its partners to carry links to other content stores and third-party app stores won’t be affected by the change, Yerga said. Android users will have to be using version 2.2 (Froyo) or above in order to access the new store, although those on older versions (now only 10 percent of Android users) will still be able to get apps.

All in all, the change seems designed to remind everyone–especially the millions using Android devices–that Google offers a lot of content. Google hasn’t exactly set the world on fire with its content services, although the company did say Monday that it has 4 million Google Music users.

It’s also hard to miss the fact that the rebranding reinforces a “Google” brand at the heart of the Android experience, which is so often dictated by Google partners.

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Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor announced it is working with 30 handset manufacturers, carriers and developers to help standardize mobile browsers and put more sophisticated tools in the hands of Web app developers. The W3C Mobile Web Platform Core Community Group — which includes AT&T, Verizon, Samsung,  Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft and others, but not Apple (aapl) or Google — will help developers understand how well their apps will work across different mobile browsers and different devices. To that end, Facebook is also introducing a mobile browser test suite called Ringmark, that will help ensure apps can run on specific browsers.

The idea is to position Facebook as a leading advocate for the mobile Web: the growing promise is that one day we’ll be able to run powerful Web applications inside our mobile browsers that are just as good as those we currently enjoy from the App Store or the Android Market. Believe it not, however, Facebook’s motives are not completely altruistic. Tipping the scale toward mobile Web development also lets Facebook get out from under the control that platform companies such as Apple exert on native mobile development, such as Apple’s insistence that it get a cut of transactions made through iOS apps.

Taylor said that while the backbone of the mobile Web–HTML5–is becoming more prevalent and is often thought of as a single standard, the reality is that it’s still quite fragmented across different mobile devices and browsers. Taylor said Facebook users access the service from 2,500 different varieties of mobile devices. That can be a hurdle for developers looking to deploy mobile Web apps that can run reliably across devices in the way that many native apps can.

Taylor also unveiled a plan to improve payments in mobile Web apps using its Facebook Credits payment system. Working with some of the biggest carriers, Facebook wants to introduce a streamlined carrier billing service that will cut down the number of steps to buy apps and in-app content. This will allow developers to include an SDK that enables payments that run quickly through a consumer’s carrier bill. It’s not clear if this will cut out opportunities for existing carrier billing providers such as Boku and Zong, which help facilitate payments on Facebook’s desktop site. Facebook earlier this month signed a deal with mobile payment and analytics provider Bango, though it’s unclear what exact role Bango will provide.

What all this shows is that Facebook is aiming to build a Web app ecosystem with itself at the center of the action. In October, it enabled app bookmarks for native and mobile Web apps, so users could have a shortcut to their favorite apps via Facebook’s mobile apps. There’s also an updated requests feature that includes invites to mobile apps and games from friends. And the news feed was updated to include information on mobile apps, complete with a link. Facebook also unveiled an HTML5 resource center to help developers build Web apps and an app showcase to highlight Web apps. This is all part of a larger effort to encourage mobile apps to connect to Facebook’s open graph.

By emphasizing HTML5 Web apps and promoting an ecosystem of apps that live outside of native app ecosystems controlled by Apple, Google and other platform holders, it can set itself as the go-to resource for mobile Web apps. But it all depends on Facebook shoring up the standards and infrastructure around this ecosystem, which it’s addressing today.

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor

There’s no guarantee that Facebook will be the hub for mobile apps. The absence of Apple and Google from its consortium is very curious, given that those two companies make the browsers used on the vast majority of mobile devices as compared to participants Microsoft, Opera, and Mozilla. And running such a project by committee is always difficult, which means native applications could remain the preferred playing field for some time to come as participants dicker over standards.

But Facebook already has a lot of momentum in mobile. It has 425 million monthly mobile users each month and sends 60 million people each month to apps and games. That’s a pretty attractive community to tap for developers for their apps.

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The company published a blog post Friday morning outlining how it believes the Facebook can help developers concerned about the discoverability problem. Getting noticed in places like Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market, or the other big third-party Android app stores is tricky and often fleeting; sometimes the result of a fluke appearance on a “best of” list.

“On many of today’s mobile platforms, distribution is often a function of ranking and position in curated app stores,” wrote Facebook’s James Pierce, head of mobile developer relations. “While this benefits established apps and (those) that are editorially featured, for the majority of developers, getting an app discovered can present a real challenge.”

Facebook’s argument is that if app developers use Facebook to have users log into their apps, new users will discover that app naturally as friends share activity within the app on their News Feed. It cited examples such as Foodspotting’s iOS app and Diamond Dash, an iOS game that enjoyed a traffic increase “by a factor of 3″ after it started using Facebook’s Single Sign On technology. But Facebook would obviously like developers to think of Facebook itself as an app development platform, highlighting the Washington Post’s Social Reader Facebook app. (Donald Graham, CEO of The Washington Post Company, is a Facebook director and investor.)

Getting into bed with Facebook isn’t necessarily a recipe for instant success: of the 425 million people who accessed Facebook through a mobile device in a month, just 60 million, or 14 percent, go on to visit another app. Still, Facebook mobile usage is growing, and Facebook’s argument that people enjoy discovering new products, information, and perhaps apps from their friends is at the heart of what could be a historic initial public offering.

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The acquisition, first reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by Apple, gives Apple a pretty robust tool to improve its App Store. Chomp lets users find apps by searching without knowing the name of a particular app. Users can search by what an app does and then find relevant results, which start appearing right as a user begins typing. Chomp looks at all the data associated with an app to bring up results and also gathers information from blogs, social networking sites and other app stores to find what’s trending. The company also launched “Chomp Search Ads” last fall, a sort of AdWords program allowing developers to bid on certain keywords in app searches.

Verizon actually rebuilt its VCast App Store in September using Chomp to power discovery, even though it only had a few thousand apps in its store. It showed that even a big company like Verizon saw value in applying more smarts to app discovery, something the Android Market has been criticized for not improving upon. Chomp will reportedly continue to power VCast App Store for now, but that arrangement will eventually end as it gets integrated into the App Store experience, TechCrunch said.

The price of the deal was not announced though Bloomberg said it was worth $50 million. This is Apple’s second acquisition this year following its purchase of Anobit, an Israeli company that makes digital signal processing tech to improve the performance of NAND flash. It’s unclear if Apple under Tim Cook is going to be more acquisitive but Apple historically has not been a big buyer of companies like Google, Oracle and others. But with about $100 billion in cash and investments, it makes sense to look at absorbing more companies, as long as it can find a team that fits with its culture.

The purchase of Chomp, which has raised about $2.5 million, comes as Apple is closing in on 25 billion app downloads. It continues to be well ahead of Android Market but Google’s app store has been working to close the distance in the number of apps and downloads. I think this shows that Apple knows that it needs to continue to provide the best app store experience, which has been pretty good but needs to get better.

Even though it’s the only place to buy iOS apps, there are other services like AppsFire, Zwapp, Quixey and others that are showing how to make app discovery even smarter. The App Store is a big advantage for Apple and one that helps it compete well with Android and keep consumers and developers dedicated to iOS. If it can improve upon how many apps users download and discover, it can mean more utility for consumers and a bigger payout to developers, who have already gotten $4 billion in payouts from the App Store.

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GetJar’s virtual currency builds off the existing GetJar Gold program, which allows users to download specific premium apps for free. Now, GetJar is trying to further engage users and reward their loyalty by giving them gold coins they can use to buy Android apps and pay for in-app content. It’s a model that’s growing in favor and has already been employed in recent months in some form by Tapjoy and Fiksu.

Here’s how GetJar Gold currency works:

• A user who downloads a non-sponsored Android app can earn perhaps 5 coins and for a sponsored app, they can get about 30 coins. For now, they’ll only get rewarded for downloading content. The money goes into a wallet and can be used to buy premium apps, which could sell for 20 to 50 coins. Or they can use their money to buy in-app content in games that have incorporated the GetJar Gold SDK. The coins can also be used in apps on other app stores such as Android Market and Amazon Appstore if the developer enables that in their apps.
• Developers will be able to accept gold coins for additional content and they’ll be able to encourage downloads of other sponsored apps with a GetJar reward page inside their app, which features promoted apps from GetJar. They’ll be able to exchange the gold coins for cash at a rate of 1 coin for a penny with GetJar taking a 10 percent cut.

GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs told me the goal is to cut out the use of real money, which can be a hang-up for a lot of transactions. When users are prompted to buy in-app items, they often don’t get through the entire Google Checkout process. That represents a loss of revenue for developers. By injecting its own currency for consumers, it encourages them to download and it makes it easy especially in areas where its hard to set up a payment account. It can also create simple transactions that don’t require a password since the cash is virtual. And by making the currency liquid for developers, it gives them a more viable way to monetize their freemium apps. Developers will still be able to use existing checkout methods.

“The problem is you send 100 users through a checkout process and only one use will complete the whole process. But because virtual currency isn’t subjected to the same limitations and requirements, our conversions are massively better,” said Laurs. “We predict our conversions will be ten times higher than checkout or any credit card or even carrier conversion.”

Laurs said the other objective is to just engender more loyalty with users, to show them that their time spent with GetJar is valuable. He said user loyalty is even more important than simple spending. ”Loyalty is worth money and we’re willing to give a portion of that to users,” said Laurs. “We want to make people want to download with us.”

The program is funded by taking a chunk of the marketing dollars sponsors pay to GetJar to promote their apps. GetJar keeps a portion of that money and also takes a cut when developers cash out. But the remainder flows ultimately to developers.

It’s an interesting idea that is meant to keep GetJar as a main destination for app downloaders. The company said it’s the largest independent app store with more than 2 billion downloads to date and 350,000 mobile applications for Android. But it’s facing more competition from rival apps stores and other emerging app discovery services that are looking to become a go-to resource for finding apps.

GetJar Gold is in fact kind of similar to recent efforts from Tapjoy and Fisku. Tapjoy Games, a new consumer portal rewards people with virtual currency for downloading apps, watching a video ad or signing up for a subscription service. Fiksu’s FreeMyApps gives users credit for downloading and interacting with free apps, which they can use to buy other premium apps through FreeMyApps.

The trend toward paying users in virtual currency to download apps is ultimately about driving and keeping traffic, which is critical to all of these models. That’s not as much a concern for Android Market but increasingly, app stores are showing they need to entice users to keep them coming. Amazon has employed its free app of the day, which has caused some grumbling by developers, but it’s working toward that same goal of deepening engagement and loyalty. GetJar Gold also gives developers one more reason to list their apps on GetJar, which is also another brewing battle for app stores.

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Distimo said that of the top 110 apps that appear in both the  Android Market and Amazon Appstore, 42 of them make more money on Amazon than on Android Market. Overall, 28 percent of the revenue in those top apps came from the Appstore. That’s a big showing for an Appstore that is less than one year old and has 26,826 available applications, compared to more than 400,000 worldwide for Android Market, according to Distimo.

Amazon Appstore is turning out to be a great place for paid app downloads, compared to Android Market which monetizes better through in-app purchase. Distimo said paid apps in Appstore made up 65 percent of all apps, while the percentage of paid apps in Android Market has slipped from 38 percent to 32 percent over the last seven months. Of the top 200 grossing Android Market apps, 66 percent of the revenue comes from in-app purchases.

The rise of Amazon Appstore is due in large part to the emergence of the Kindle Fire, which has been a major accelerant for Appstore and is now used more than any other Android tablet. In December, the total number of downloads generated by the top 100 apps in the Appstore increased fourteen-fold compared to two months earlier. While Android Market generated 22 times more new apps than the Appstore in September last year, by December and January, the number of new apps on Amazon had surged, cutting the Market’s advantage for new apps to about 5-1.

The fact that paid app downloads are bigger proportionately on Amazon than on Android Market may be due in part to Amazon’s pricing controls. One of the key differences between the two stores is that Amazon can change the price of apps, a provision that concerned some app makers. That control has apparently resulted in the average price of the top 100 paid applications in Amazon Appstore being 40 percent lower than in the Market. The average price of the top 100 applications is $3.76 in Google’s Android Market and $2.24 in Amazon Appstore. The game Monopoly, for example, was available for 99 cents in Appstore for a limited time last month, compared to a fixed price of $4.99 for the whole month in the Market. Amazon’s simple one-click check-out process and its overall reputation for commerce may also be driving paid downloads.

One interesting fact that emerged is that about 50 percent of Amazon’s apps don’t appear in Android Market, said Distimo. That suggests that, while many app makers are simply porting over their apps from Android Market to Amazon Appstore, a big number of apps are bypassing the Market and going straight to Amazon. It’s unclear if this is just Kindle-versions of established Android apps, but it still suggests that developers are making specific investments in Amazon apps.

The strong showing by Amazon Appstore appears to back up early anecdotal evidence I gathered in December, in which a number of Android developers reported seeing a big boost for paid app downloads on Appstore. It’s pretty amazing considering that a big proportion of these downloads is coming from just one device: the Kindle Fire. Appstore also provides apps for other Android devices, but it’s really shining because it’s the app store for Fire owners. Appstore benefits in some ways from its smaller base of apps, which makes discovery easier for users, who don’t have to wade through as many options. It will be interesting to see if Amazon can still remain as lucrative if its appstore attracts a lot more apps.

Overall, what this means for Android developers is that, if they’re looking to make money from paid downloads, they really need to think about Amazon Appstore. The work to submit an app to Amazon increasingly looks like a solid bet. And it may make sense for developers to look at the Fire as its own distinct platform. Android Market still has the largest reach compared to Appstore, which is still limited to the U.S. But more and more, we’re seeing how the Kindle Fire is providing an outsized impact on the Android ecosystem, which has gained a pretty potent way to make money from Android apps.

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The system works by analyzing new and existing applications in Android Market and also developer accounts. Bouncer scans for known malware, spyware and trojans and monitors for suspect behavior that could indicate a red flag. Google also runs each app through its cloud infrastructure to see how it will run on an Android device. Additionally, Google analyzes new developer accounts to keep out repeat offenders.

Google’s Hiroshi Lockheimer, the VP of Engineering, Android, said it is impossible to prevent all malicious apps from entering Android Market but that the company is making significant progress in decreasing the number of bad apps being downloaded. Said Lockheimer:

No security approach is foolproof, and added scrutiny can often lead to important improvements. Our systems are getting better at detecting and eliminating malware every day, and we continue to invite the community to work with us to keep Android safe.

Google is attempting to make Android Market safer without imposing more burdens on developers. That means developers can still upload away and consumers can get the apps immediately, unlike Apple’s App Store, which reviews and approves each app, creating delays. It is a tight balance, because Google has been increasingly called out for malware apps that make it into its store. Working in the background allows Google to apply a technology solution that should require less manpower. And it can still encourage developers to keep iterating and developing for Android without enforcing time-consuming reviews.

But while this may cut down on the overall number of malicious apps, it only takes one or two big attacks to undermine Android’s reputation here. And that may be enough to still fuel the work of companies like Lookout and Symantec, which are getting mileage out of harping on Android’s security concerns. Of bigger concern is the fact that there is still not much disincentive for bad actors to introduce malware into Android Market. Google will boot out offenders and work to prevent their return, but with just a threat of losing a $25 developer registration fee, the penalties for getting caught may not keep bad developers out. But at the very least Google is addressing the issue further and seems to understand that it is only going to become more of a target as it racks up app downloads, which are now up to 11 billion.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Anuj Biyani

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Video calling service Tango’s new paid features have experienced two million subscribers on both Android and iOS since their introduction, Tango founder and CTO Eric Setton told the New York Times on Monday. But those using Apple’s platform convert from the app’s free basic service to paid add-ons four times as often as do Android users. Setton thinks there is a very simple reason why that is, one that doesn’t have to do with app quality or platform user demographics:

It comes from years of collecting credit card numbers on iTunes. People can use their stored credit card numbers and purchase things easily. Punching in a credit card number on Android is more work.

Of course, you can add and store credit cards on the Android Market, too, but that’s an additional step on Google’s OS that isn’t required on Apple’s for most, since credit cards will already be on file, thanks to previous iTunes music or movie purchases. Also, iTunes allows multiple payment methods; you can tie it to iTunes gift cards or preapproved spending limits automatically, making it more flexible overall.

People are also slow to adopt new online payment methods, which is why it is so crucial that the App Store doesn’t require one; users simply have to continue using the same system they have already embraced for purchasing digital music online for nearly a decade. The iTunes Store has been the No. 1 music retailer since 2008, so it has had plenty of time to win the trust of a large number of users. Google, on the other hand, traditionally hasn’t asked its users to pay a dime for pretty much anything.

The good news for Google is that the barrier to entry for users new to any and all online purchasing is roughly the same for both platforms, meaning eventually users should be just as comfortable with paying on one OS vs. the other. The good news for Apple, though, is that for the time being, it remains the trusted vendor of choice for online purchases, particularly among the generation that cut its teeth on iPods and the iTunes Store.

So far, that role has led to increased consumer activity on Apple’s digital stores and devices, but Apple’s recently introduced EasyPay system indicates its effects could bleed over into real-world transactions, too. Google may have gotten Wallet out into the wild early, but trust could trump speed when it comes to long-term mobile commerce adoption.

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