It’s been 72 hours since the Android Market went live, but already bets are being places as to whether it will be as successful as Apple’s in driving millions of downloads to the phone. The conclusion that Medialets, an ad network for both Android and iPhone applications, made after comparing the first 24 hours of traffic on both the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) App store and the Android Market is that it’s too early to tell. In a blog post, Medialets theorized: “Although the ranges for the top Android apps are similar, it is still too early to assert with confidence that a trajectory similar to Apple’s App Store is occurring. Other factors over time need to be considered, including the total number of apps in the market.”

Of course, the industry is hoping that Android consumers will be as quick to download and consume applications and data as iPhone users, but it will be a tough target demographic to beat. This week, Steve Jobs announced that the App store hit 200 million downloads, just 102 days after launching the storefront. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” Jobs explained. Today, the App store has about 5,500 downloads available, and it is live in 62 countries. “Competitors are scrambling to copy our App store,” Jobs said.

Medialets released statistics on the performance of both storefronts, but it’s hard to draw comparisons between the two because of stark differences in the way Apple and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) operate. Here are some findings:

—Available Apps: During the first 24 hours of Android Market, 62 free apps were available, or less than 10 percent of the number during Apple’s App Store launch. Although Apple allowed both free and paid app, paid downloads for Android will not be available until Q1 2009.

—Number of Downloads: Android Market is providing some detail on downloads per application, whereas Apple hid the information after the first 15 hours. Android reported the smallest range for an app was between 100 and 500 downloads, whereas the largest range was between 10,000 and 50,000. Given those ranges, roughly 206,000 to 770,000 downloads occurred within the first 24 hours of launch. The weighted average of midpoints is 7,850 downloads per app.

—Volume Heavy on Android: Nine apps broke the 10,000 to 50,000 range on Android, whereas in the early hours of the iPhone App Store, only two apps broke the 10,000 download mark - Remote and AIM. Remote was downloaded about 16,000 times.

—Favorite Categories are similar: It appears that either Android users are generally interested in the same types of application functionality as iPhone users, or possibly, that Android developers are generally interested in creating the same types of apps as iPhone developers. The top categories are: games, multimedia, lifestyle, travel and productivity. The categories that presented less than 10 percent of downloads were: entertainment, reference, finance, social networking and news and weather.