Apple Music is rapidly growing in popularity on Android, hitting big Google Play milestone

Apple unveiled a ton of interesting stuff at a (Hollywood) star-studded event yesterday, but much to the disappointment of iPod Touch fans and potential AirPower buyers, not a single hardware announcement was made on stage in the Steve Jobs Theater during this “Show Time” shindig. While Apple’s focus on the so-called “services” business has sharply increased over the past year or so, it’s safe to assume the company’s TV+, News+, and Arcade platforms wouldn’t have happened were it not for the success of Apple Music.
What’s perhaps even more impressive is that quarterly Android installs have apparently begun to surge again after a temporary but steep decline in late 2017 and early 2018. In fact, Q1 2019 could be Apple Music’s best-ever three-month period in terms of Google Play downloads, which are expected to reach 3.8 million by the end of March. That would represent an increase of half a million downloads from the final quarter of last year and an incredible 1.5 million more installs than back in Q2 2018.
Obviously, it’s unclear how many of these downloads typically end up converting into long-term paid subscriptions, but that figure is also up, so there’s definitely a correlation between the two, even when not taking iOS usage and install numbers into consideration.