EXAMINING THE NUMBERS AND TRENDS

According to a May 2011 online collaboration (www.facebook.com/500kapps) by Chomp (an application search engine, located at www.chomp.com), 148Apps (a website at www.148apps.com that spotlights iOS applications), and Chillingo (an independent game publisher and division of Electronic Arts located at www.chillingo.com), the following was noted:

• In late May 2011, Apple approved its 500,000th app on all its current platforms (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad).
• As of September, 2011, the number of active apps available for download was roughly 500,000.
• There are roughly 86,000 unique developers.
• Of all apps, roughly 40 percent are free! There is a big push toward free and freemium (see Chapter 7).
• The average price of a paid app is $3.64, which seems on par from a plateau over the past couple of years, and reflects a sharp drop from an initial price of around $6 back in mid-2008.
• The average number of apps per developer is 4.6.
• The category distribution over time has stayed fairly constant from 2008 until today, with the big five categories accounting for 54 percent of all apps (Games at 16 percent, Books at 13 percent, Entertainment at 11 percent, Education at 7 percent, and Lifestyle at 7 percent). All other categories combined to account for roughly 46 percent.

Table 3-1 (courtesy of 148apps.biz) shows the most popular App Store categories, ranked by number of apps within the category. Of course, if you're reading this well past publication, these will undoubtedly have shifted and grown. But barring any major changes in the way the App Store functions, these should be representative of general rankings, give or take a few percentage points, for the foreseeable future. For the most up-to-date stats, it will always be best to check in with the source, in this case, 148apps.biz.

TABLE 3-1: All Categories Ranked by Number of Apps within Category

Table 3-2 shows a breakdown of price.

TABLE 3-2: All Apps Broken Down by Price

The next several stats deal with revenue generated and expected, as well as those apps that have been most successful at Number 1.

• In 2010, 4.5 billion apps have sold to generate $6.8 billion in revenue (Gartner, Apple).
• Over the next two years, both the number of apps sold and revenue are expected to somewhat exponentially increase.
• Currently, based on time spent at Number 1 in the App Store, the top ten most popular apps of all time were all from the Games category.
• The top game, “Angry Birds,” spent an amazing nine months (275 days) at Number 1. The next highest amount of time occupying the Number 1 slot was just 38 days, then 27 days, and even the Number 14 app of the year spent 20 days at Number 1.

These statistics show the one outlier, “Angry Birds,” and then that the rest commonly last around 20 days for the most popular apps. In other words, positions at the top change quite frequently in the App Store. Despite this, it is typically possible to maintain or grow your general ranking with respect to competing apps in your niche over time, as Chapter 11 will demonstrate.

In the next section, “Making Decisions Based on Research,” you'll find opinions on what these numbers and trends may mean for you, but first let's gobble up a few more statistics.

• According to AdMob (metrics.admob.com), in May 2010, there were roughly twice the number of iPhone users (67 percent) versus iPod Touch (31 percent), with iPad checking with only 2 percent of the users. That's likely shifted somewhat today, but the take-away here is that there are more iPhone users than iPod Touch users.
• However, iPod Touch users spend 20 percent more time with their apps than iPhone users — likely because it's a device similar to the iPad (where app use is more a primary feature, whereas iPhone users are split between calls and app use). All three have music capability, obviously.
• The average selling price of the top 300 apps for iPhone was $1.57, while for iPad it was $4.19 (according to “Insights into Apple's App EcoSystem: Comparing Mac, iPad and iPhone” at www.distimo.com).
• While the average price of a paid app was roughly $3.64 (according to the report cited earlier), the overall average (free and paid) was $2.26 (according to www.148apps.biz). For free and paid apps, the average game was just $1.05, and the app was $2.47 — which says something about the category.