Main Differences between iTunes and Google Play

Diana Joan

Apr 15, 2015 01:35 am / Posted by Diana Joan

With the continuous launch of new computers and mobile devices, apps become more and more popular all around the world. Almost all these apps come from two digital media stores, iTunes and Google Play. After installation of apps on their tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices, users enjoy music, movies, games, and never get bored with lots of funs. Both Apple and Google have in common: They both lead their own app store in number of downloaded apps. What are the main differences between iTunes and Google Play? Most people may be confused about this and are looking for the answer. According to the experts online, here are some main difference between iTunes and Google Play.

iTunes Google Play comparison

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Apple Has the Most Content

As we all know, Apple continues to have the biggest catalog of music and video offerings–more than 28 million songs and 45,000 for-purchase movies as of April, and more than 85,000 TV episodes as of last October. Google is far less specific about the size of its catalog, but it clearly trails the other two. Publicly, Google says that it has “millions” of songs and “thousands” of movies and TV shows.

Selling Content & Quantity

Both iTunes Store and Google Play sell digital media sources including music, movies, TV shows and apps. The difference here is iTunes Store sells audiobooks, podcast, and music videos, while Google Play, differently from iTunes, sells ebooks, subscriptions to magazines, web feeds and server-generated topical feeds, devices including Nexus, Chromebooks, Google-branded hardware and accessories.

The comparable is what both of them sell. iTunes Store surpasses Google Play in music, movies and TV shows while in apps quantity, they cannot exceed each other. The incomparable can also give us a hint of the storage capacity of the two media store. For example, audiobooks in iTunes Store amounts to 20,000+ and podcast to more than one million. And Google Play Books is the world’s largest ebookstore with over 5 million titles and Play Newsstand features about 1,900 free and paid publications.

Apple to Indie Developers & Google Play to Mobile Enterprises

The majority of apps in iTunes Store are made by indie developers, and seven out of the top ten apps were indie games, compared to only one out of ten in the Google Play store. You can also see that over the seven days, 65% of the apps for iPhone were indies, compared to only 10% in Google Play. On the contrary, the top charts seem to show us that Google Play is favorable to mobile focused enterprises. If you look at the top ten for any day, you can see that four of the apps are owned or made by public companies. If we look at the entire week, we see that a staggering 90% of the apps are mobile focused enterprises. Looking at the data, it’s clear that mobile first enterprises dominate the top ten for Google Play, especially when compared to iOS.

Playback Options Differ

Both iTunes and Google Play offers the 30-day interval for initial access to watch rental movies, but iTunes leaves users 24 hours once start watching, while Google Play has 48 hours. These limits vary from title to title, in part because Hollywood studios dictate them–and the studios are still scrambling to figure out how best to monetize their content.

More significantly, though you can instantly stream iTunes purchases to Apple TV, the iTunes store does not support instant streaming of content to iOS devices–iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touch players–which means that you have to download the (purchased or rented) content first. Google Play, by contrast, can start streaming purchased or rented content on compatible devices immediately.

Additional Information

Both music in iTunes Store and Google Play are free of DRM now which means you can copy, edit, and burn songs from the two stores. TV shows and movies purchased or rented from iTunes Store or Google Play are all protected from access them freely. iTunes videos cannot be played on any other devices other than Apple devices. Google play videos can be watched on the Google Play website or via an application on an Android device. Here shows you how to strip DRM protection from iTunes purchased movies without hassle.

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