App Annie launches Amazon Appstore analytics: Amazon is all about fun, Google is all about utilities

Mobile app analytics source App Annie announced today that it is adding Amazon Appstore statistics to its existing Google Play and iOS analytics solutions. The service is currently in beta release.

And what the data shows is that the top apps on Amazon are very, very different than Google Play.

All of Amazon’s top 10 paid apps are games, including three Disney titles: Where’s My Water and two versions of the super-popular Temple Run app (Oz and Brave). And while Mojang’s popular Minecraft game is near the top in both stores, the key difference is that Google Play’s top 10 selling apps include seven utilities, including Swiftkey Keyboard, the top-selling app in the U.S.

When it comes to free apps, social networking and communications apps dominate Google Play: Facebook is the top app, Instagram is at number three, Facebook Messenger is at five, and Skype and Twitter are at eight and nine. On Amazon, Facebook barely cracks the top 10, and no other social networking or communications tool comes close.

One of App Annie’s goals, of course, is to show developers where the big opportunities are. Based on the early returns, the main thing Amazon customers want from the company’s app store is games.

Analytics for the Amazon Appstore are important, since Amazon’s Kindle family is almost certainly the best-selling Android family of tablets in the world. Amazon doesn’t release Kindle sales statistics, but the Kindle Fire HD 7-inch dominates web use by Android devices, and ABI Research has calculated the total number of Kindle tablets in the market as of January as up to 12.5 million.

Distimo, which also provides app store analytics, already includes Amazon Appstore numbers in its privately available data.

Image credit: Blake Patterson/Flickr