The nation is among the top five markets for Google Inc’s app store by revenue, helped by the public’s increasing use of smartphones, Google said yesterday.
Google vice president of engineering and Google Play in Asia-Pacific head Chris Yerga told a news conference in Taipei that three of the top five Google Play markets are in Asia — Taiwan, Japan and South Korea — and that the US is also among the five.
He declined to name the fifth market or give the specific rankings of the top five, saying only that the figures were not for public consumption.
It was not a surprise to see three Asian markets in the top-five list given the high smartphone penetration rates in these countries, which in turn leads to strong demand for mobile games, Yerga said.
Launched in 2012 as the official app store for Google’s Android operating system, Google Play now has more than 1 million free and paying apps and over 50 billion downloads. It also offers music, games, magazines, books, movies and television programs.
Google Play’s game services received 100 million new users between January and June last year, making it the fastest-growing mobile gaming network ever, according to Google.
A poll released in December last year by the Institute for Information Industry (資策會) found that 13.55 million Taiwanese aged over 12 owned a smartphone by the second half of last year, representing 65.4 percent of Taiwanese in that demographic.
That was up from a smartphone penetration rate of 58.7 percent during the first half of last year, the survey said.
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