Distimo just released their latest report for August, which details sales of all the current mobile application stores. Here are the noteworthy results so far:
While the average price of all applications is only 16% higher in the Apple App Store for iPad than in the Apple App Store for iPhone, the average price of the 100 most popular applications is nearly three times as high in the Apple App Store for iPad.
Clearly people are willing to way for good quality apps on the iPad. The problem with the iPad appstore presently is that many of the apps are just supersized iPhone applications made to fit the bigger resolution, without really adding any functionality. But slowly this is changing – just look at the newly released Twitter for iPad, which makes good use of the large touch panel and gives as an idea of where iPad apps are moving towards in terms of user interaction and design conventions:
In the Apple App Store for iPad, BlackBerry App World and Windows Marketplace for Mobile, the respective companies that run each application store, (Apple, Research In Motion and Microsoft) are the top publishers in their own store with only a limited number of applications. Clickgamer.com and Offscreen publish many popular games in the Apple App Store for iPhone and Nokia Ovi Store making them the top publishers in these stores.
People expect higher quality apps from the vendors who design the software, and in most cases this does show. Apple‘s Pages is a prime example of this – while not super functional, the interface and ease of use is way ahead of any other similiar offering from other vendors.
Average prices of the different appstores also bring up some interesting results:
Google Marketplace has the lowest pricing, and the store size is rapidly increasing. Also worth noting is Blackberry‘s cost which is still quite high, but this can be ascribed to their minimum price being $2.99, but this is being changed with the latest release of App World. So expect those prices to drop soon enough. The iPad is still being seen by developers as a higher income “niche” product, so the current prices still reflect this.
Here is some other results from the different appstores:
If you want to read the Distimo report more in-depth, you can find it here.
Thanks to Distimo, we can look at what is the most popular apps in the various appstores of the different mobile platforms – the report covers the Apple App Store for iPad and iPhone (with specific focus on in-app purchases), as well as BlackBerry App World (Worldwide), Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile for June 2010 in the United States.
Here are the top selling apps by platform:
True to form, the top selling apps on Android remain tools and utilities, which pretty much confirms who the Android phone’s current target market is:
On the iPhone, games dominate the top selling apps. Its clearly the preferred platform for game developers currently.
On the iPad, things look a little more productive. Like in the last report, Apple’s Pages word processor app is the top seller. It seems people are willing to actually pay for apps to make work easier on the iPad.
And then on the Blackberry front, here are the top sellers. The best sellers are themes for the OS:
Some other interesting tidbits out of the report:
- The percentage of applications with in-app purchases is significantly higher in the Apple App Store for iPad (10%) than in the
Apple App Store for iPhone (2%). The Games and Social Networking categories in both stores have the highest proportion of
applications with in-app purchases available.- The most successful free applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone are
MobiTV (MobiTV), ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup (ESPN) and Tap Fish (BayView Labs).- The most successful paid applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone are
Guitar Hero (Activision Publishing, Inc.), TomTom U.S.A. (TomTom International BV) and Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies II
(Activision Publishing, Inc.).- Mirroring the Distimo report covering May 2010, Pages and iBooks, published by Apple Inc, are again the number one paid and free
applications on the Apple App Store for iPad, respectively.- Three out of the ten most popular applications in the Apple App Store for iPhone were published by Electronic Arts.
- Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad entered the top 10 highest ranked paid applications chart in the 6th position. It was the
top grossing application in the Apple App Store for iPad after Pages by Apple Inc.- Nine out of the ten most popular paid applications on the Apple App Store for iPhone are Games, however only two out of the ten
most popular free applications are Games. In the Nokia Ovi Store, seven out of ten of the most popular paid applications are
Games, while only three out of ten of the most popular free applications are Games.
If you want to see the report for yourself, go look at it here.
Dutch analytics company Distimo have just released their latest report, which focuses on the US App Store for the iPad and iPhone. The report makes for good reading for anyone with an interest in mobile device application development.
According to the report, the number of apps for iPad has grown to 4,870 since the release of the iPad on 3 April. Predictably, the largest application category for the iPad is Games, which has 1,577 titles (32% of the total), followed by Entertainment with 455 titles and Books with 396.
The average price of an iPhone app in the app store is $3.82, as opposed to $4.67 for iPad apps. 80% of the 4,870 applications for iPad are paid, compared to 73% of the 186,414 applications for iPhone.
Medical and Finance applications are the most expensive apps for the iPad, at an average of $42.11 and $18.48 respectively. This is significantly more than the average price for applications in these categories for iPhone ($10.74 and $5.74 respectively).
Visit the Distimo site to download the full report for free.