Low-Competition App Marketplaces

Paraphrasing an interesting nugget from a recent MFM podcast…

There are 1.6 billion iPhone users and 2 million iPhone apps. Meanwhile, there are 3 billion Chrome users and only 200,000 Chrome extensions, so there’s a lot more opportunity there.

I checked the numbers and added a few more, ordered by ratio:

• 3200 Shopify apps, 1 million businesses using Shopify = 1:312 (one app for every 312 users)
• 2 million apps in Apple App Store, 1.65 billion active Apple devices = 1:825
• 3 million Google Play apps, 2.5 billion Android users = 1:833
• 58,000 WordPress plugins, 75 million WordPress websites = 1:1293
• 150,000 Chrome extensions, 3 billion Chrome users = 1:20,000

As you can see, the Chrome ratio dwarfs the rest. Meaning there probably is a ton of opportunity there, though I suspect Chrome users aren’t used to paying for extensions the same way iOS or Android users are used to paying for apps.

Honey is the prime example of a Chrome extension that makes big money. It works on pretty much all browsers and sold to PayPal for $4 billion in 2019 😎

A more relatable example is TexTrader, which apparently made $4,012 in 7 days recently. (That last link is a good place to start if you want to learn more about building a Chrome extension, even if you’re not a developer.)

As they said on the MFM podcast, it’s worth thinking about what apps are successful on crowded marketplaces, and considering if they could be emulated somewhere less crowded. 🤔

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