As of July 28, 2026, 765,900 developer accounts are actively publishing apps on Google Play, according to app-intelligence firm 42matters’ live catalog tracker. That is the most current, verifiable answer to how many Android developers exist, though it undercounts anyone who has registered with Google but never shipped a live app. Google, unlike Apple, has never published a developer count of its own, so third-party trackers are the only source for even an approximate figure.
How many Android developers are actively publishing apps right now?
The most current count again comes from third-party crawlers that track Google Play directly rather than from Google’s own disclosures. 42matters, the same app-intelligence firm that tracks the Apple App Store, counted 765,900 active publisher accounts on Google Play, measured July 28, 2026. Between them, those publishers maintain 2,474,255 live apps, an average of 3.23 apps per active account, and add roughly 2,613 new listings per day.
That combined figure has the same limit as any store-level developer count: an account with several employees publishing under one company listing still counts once, so the true number of individual people writing Android code is higher than 765,900, not lower. It also excludes anyone who holds a Google Play Console account but has never published an app.
Figure 1: Active Google Play publisher accounts measured against Apple App Store publishers, both counted the same day. Source: 42matters live trackers, July 28, 2026.
The gap between the two stores, 765,900 against Apple’s 1,063,724 active publishers measured the same day, does not mean Android has fewer developers overall. Android holds 69.14% of global mobile OS market share against iOS’s 30.79%, per StatCounter’s June 2026 tracking data, so a larger reachable audience is being served through fewer distinct Google Play publisher accounts than on the Apple side, at least by this measurement.
Is there an official worldwide Android developer count?
No. Google has never published a lifetime or live developer count for Android or Google Play, not even once. That is a sharper contrast than it first appears: Apple, the other major mobile platform, does disclose a number, telling its own developers it had 34 million registered developers company-wide during Tim Cook’s WWDC keynote on June 6, 2022, a figure still repeated today because Apple has not issued a fresher one since.
Google’s silence on this point is not new. Neither its annual Android platform updates nor Google Play’s own transparency and security reports name a total developer count, active or registered, in the way Apple occasionally has. The closest Google gets is disclosing enforcement totals instead: it rejected more than 1.75 million app submissions for policy violations in 2025 and banned over 80,000 developer accounts attempting to publish harmful apps, according to Google’s own annual Android and Google Play security review, reported by BleepingComputer and TechRadar in February 2026.
Figure 2: Why Android developer counts always come from third parties rather than from Google itself. Source: 42matters live tracker; Apple WWDC 2022.
That enforcement volume is also why an outdated EULA is a real publishing risk, not just a legal formality: an app whose licensing terms and data disclosures no longer match what it collects is exactly the kind of submission Google’s review process is built to catch. You can generate a EULA that reflects your app’s current permissions rather than reusing language written for an earlier version.
How widely is Kotlin used among Android developers?
Very widely, by the measure that matters most for Android specifically. Over 95% of the top 1,000 Android apps on Google Play contained Kotlin code as of 2024, according to Dice Insights’ State of Kotlin report, published May 30, 2024. Google gave Kotlin first-class Android support at I/O 2017 and named it the platform’s preferred language on May 7, 2019, and even at that 2019 announcement Google said over 50% of professional Android developers were already using it, per TechCrunch’s reporting on the keynote.
A broader, cross-platform measure tells a smaller-looking story. Just 10.8% of the 31,771 developers who answered the programming-language question in the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey reported using Kotlin over the past year. That sample spans every kind of developer, backend, web, and data engineers included, not Android specialists alone, so it understates Kotlin’s real share among people actually building for Android. Read the two figures together rather than against each other: 95% describes Android’s own top-app catalog, and 10.8% describes the entire Stack Overflow respondent pool, most of whom never touch Android at all.
Figure 3: Share of surveyed developers who report working in Kotlin, across every specialty, not Android alone. Source: Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey, technology question, n=31,771.
How many apps do Android developers publish, and how fast is the catalog growing?
765,900 active publishers maintain 2,474,255 live apps on Google Play, an average of 3.23 apps per account, with roughly 2,613 new listings added per day, all per 42matters’ July 28, 2026 snapshot. That output pace runs ahead of the Apple App Store’s, where 1,063,724 active publishers maintain 2,499,903 apps, averaging 2.35 apps per account. A Google Play developer publishing more apps per account, on average, is consistent with the platform’s lower cost of entry and long history of high submission volume.
Growth has not been even across the catalog’s history. Google purged large numbers of low-quality and abandoned listings starting in 2024 under stricter Play Console policies, which is part of why the current total sits well below the roughly 3.6 million apps the store carried near its mid-2010s peak, even as active publisher accounts and daily new listings have both kept climbing since, according to Business of Apps’ Google Play tracking.
What do Android developers earn?
In the United States specifically, Indeed puts the average Android developer salary at $138,050 per year, based on roughly 1,100 salary data points collected from job postings over the trailing 36 months, updated July 19, 2026. Reported pay ranges widely around that average, from $80,274 to $237,407, reflecting the gap between junior mobile roles and senior or specialist Android engineering positions.
That range sits close to, and by this tracker slightly above, reported iOS developer pay, which Indeed put at $137,346 as of mid-2026 in our iOS developer figures. Neither store’s developer pay data is broken out by seniority or region in these trackers, so treat the averages as a starting point for negotiation, not a ceiling.
How does the Android developer population compare to the broader developer world?
Zoomed out past Google Play entirely, the numbers get larger and less Android-specific. Evans Data Corporation counted 27 million professional developers worldwide in 2024, the 35th edition of a Global Developer Population study it has run biannually since 2006. SlashData’s developer-population research put the worldwide total at 47.2 million as of the first quarter of 2025.
Figure 4: Key Android-development and developer-population disclosures, 2017 to 2026. Sources: TechCrunch, Dice Insights, SlashData, 42matters.
None of these figures measure the same population. Evans Data counts professional software developers across every specialty. SlashData counts anyone who writes code as part of their work or personal projects, professional or not. Apple’s 34 million counts everyone who has ever registered for its developer program, most of whom never ship an app. Only 42matters’ 765,900 measures people publishing live Google Play apps right now, which puts active Android publishers at somewhere between 1.6% (against SlashData) and 2.8% (against Evans Data) of the wider developer population, depending on which baseline is used.
How does Google Play compare to the Apple App Store, developer for developer?
Beyond the headline publisher counts, the two stores differ in both catalog size and how aggressively each store polices submissions. Apple’s store carries slightly more live apps overall, and Google’s enforcement numbers, 1.75 million-plus rejected submissions and 80,000-plus banned accounts in 2025 alone, are the more specific of the two, since Apple’s own transparency reporting groups its rejection and termination figures differently. For the download and revenue side of the same app economy these developers are building for, see our App Store 2026 breakdown, which covers 149 billion downloads and $167 billion in combined 2025 consumer spending across both stores.
Figure 5: Apple leads on active developer reach, Google Play leads on apps shipped per developer. Source: 42matters, July 28, 2026.
Read the two stores as complementary lenses rather than competing scoreboards: Apple has more active publishers but each ships fewer apps on average, while Google Play has fewer active publishers who each ship more.
Android developer counts, side by side
| Source | What it measures | Count | Measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| 42matters | Active Google Play publisher accounts | 765,900 | Jul 28, 2026 |
| 42matters | Active Apple App Store publisher accounts | 1,063,724 | Jul 28, 2026 |
| Apple (WWDC 2022) | Registered developers, all Apple platforms | 34 million | Jun 6, 2022 |
| SlashData | Worldwide developer population | 47.2 million | Q1 2025 |
| Evans Data Corporation | Professional software developers worldwide | 27 million | 2024 |
Every number in that table is real and sourced, and every one would mislead if presented alone as “the” Android developer count. The table below narrows the lens to what active Google Play publishers ship today.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Active publisher accounts | 765,900 |
| Live apps on the store | 2,474,255 |
| Average apps per publisher | 3.23 |
| New apps published per day | 2,613 |
Source: 42matters live tracker, measured July 28, 2026.
The Bottom Line
There is no official count of Android developers, and Google has never even tried to publish one the way Apple periodically does. The most current, narrowly defined figure is 765,900 active Google Play publisher accounts, measured July 28, 2026, essentially matched by Apple’s 1,063,724 App Store publishers measured the same day. Kotlin’s dominance inside that population is not in doubt: over 95% of the top 1,000 Google Play apps contain Kotlin code, even though a broader Stack Overflow sample puts overall Kotlin usage at just 10.8%, because that sample includes millions of developers who never touch Android. Zoomed out further, SlashData’s 47.2 million and Evans Data’s 27 million describe the entire worldwide developer population, of which active Android publishers make up a low single-digit share. If you are one of the 765,900 shipping on Google Play today, the number that matters most is not any of these three, it is whether your EULA still matches what your app actually collects, given that Google rejected 1.75 million-plus submissions and banned over 80,000 developer accounts in 2025 alone.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Android developers are there in 2026? 765,900 developer accounts are actively publishing apps on Google Play, according to 42matters’ live catalog tracker measured July 28, 2026. That figure covers every account with at least one live app, not people who have registered with Google but never shipped one.
Does Google publish an official Android developer count? No. Unlike Apple, which disclosed 34 million registered developers company-wide at its 2022 WWDC keynote, Google has never published a lifetime or live developer count for Android or Google Play. The 765,900 figure comes from a third-party crawler, not from Google itself.
How widely is Kotlin used among Android developers? Over 95% of the top 1,000 Android apps on Google Play contained Kotlin code as of 2024, according to Dice Insights’ State of Kotlin report. A broader Stack Overflow survey found only 10.8% of all 31,771 respondents who answered its 2025 language question used Kotlin, but that sample spans every kind of developer, not just those building for Android.
How many software developers are there worldwide, and where do Android developers fit? SlashData counted 47.2 million developers worldwide in the first quarter of 2025, and Evans Data Corporation separately counted 27 million professional developers in 2024. Against either total, the 765,900 active Google Play publishers make up roughly 1.6% to 2.8% of the global developer population.
Sources and References
- 42matters. “Google Play Statistics and Trends.” Live tracker, data captured July 28, 2026.
- 42matters. “iOS Apple App Store Statistics and Trends.” Live tracker, data captured July 28, 2026.
- TechCrunch. (2019, May 7). “Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development.”
- Dice Insights. (2024, May 30). “State of Kotlin in 2024.”
- Stack Overflow. “2025 Developer Survey: Technology.” Programming-language question, n=31,771.
- SlashData. “Global Developer Population Trends 2025.” State of the Developer Nation research, Q1 2025 estimate.
- Evans Data Corporation. (2024). “Worldwide Developer Population Grows to 27 Million.” Press release, published July 29, 2024.
- AppleInsider. (2022). “Apple now has over 34 million registered developers.” Reporting Tim Cook’s WWDC keynote, June 6, 2022.
- BleepingComputer. (2026, February 19). “Google blocked over 1.75 million Play Store app submissions in 2025.” Reporting on Google’s annual Android and Google Play security review.
- StatCounter. (2026, June). “Mobile Operating System Market Share Worldwide.”
- Indeed. (2026, July 19). “Android Developer Salaries.” Career Explorer, based on job postings from the trailing 36 months.
Note: All figures verified as of July 2026. Store-level publisher counts are live, third-party-tracked figures that change daily rather than official published statistics, so the headline numbers in this article are refreshed at least twice a year.
