Tag: App Store

App Stores Grow Dramatically, Ovi Climbs to Third Place

The last four months have seen tremendous app growth. Apple grew by 59k apps while Android added nearly 10k and Nokia added 5.5k apps to Ovi.

As a percent, Palm grew the fastest with 1,352%, followed by Ovi with 827%. The slowest growing was actually Blackberry App World with a mere 56% growth.

More curious is the popularity of certain categories. Games and Books are dominant in the App Store, while Personalization and Music account for more than half of Ovi (ringtones and wallpapers?)

Finally, in terms of catalog ranking overall, Ovi climbed the league table to third spot behind Apple and Android and overtaking Blackberry App World. Palm overtook Windows Mobile Marketplace which is now dead last with 693 apps.

link: Distimo Mobile World Congress 2010 Presentation – Mobile Application Stores State of Play


iPhone/App Store Now in 90 Countries

There are 193 recognized sovereign states, so they’re about half way there…

App Store now supports Armenia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Jordan, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, and Uganda.

Coming soon: Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/countries/


Coming Soon: 1000 New Apps Per Day

According to 148apps.biz there are 823 apps being submitted to the app store every day for the month of February. If it’s maintained this will be a new record, beating the 821 apps per day for last December.

This rate implies 300k apps per year run rate. Of course, the submission rate has been increasing steadily so it might not be long before we see 1000 apps per day.

Source: 148apps.biz.


iPhone App Catalog on Track for 500k Apps by July 2011

Taking the data released so far on the iTunes App Store and performing to usual regression analysis gives us a high degree of confidence that 300k apps will be achieved by end of this year and 500k well before the end of next year.

The app add rate is running at about 500 apps per day.

The graphs above show the total catalog and the app addition rate as reported by Apple and as estimated by 148apps.com.

The other useful data is that 148apps.com has had a pretty good record in tracking the catalog.


iTunes: Apps Downloading Faster than Songs

Apple just started its countdown clock to 10 billion song downloads.

I combined the data available for iTunes downloads of Songs and Apps (from Wikipedia) in the graphs above.

Obviously, the App download rate is increasing (i.e apps are accelerating more rapidly) than songs. Both are averaging about 10 million units per day over the past 3 months.

A Download Totals graph also shows the acceleration plainly with the App Store getting to 3 Billion downloads in 19 months vs. 36 months for Songs. A curve-fitting analysis shows that the App store will reach 10 billion downloads 27 months after launch or around October 2010.

The same analysis shows that the App Store will overtake the Music Store in total units downloaded in December 2010 when they both reach around 13.5 billion downloads.


60% of Top 100 Brands on the App Store

I wanted to check how popular the App Store was for the world’s brands. As a quick experiment, I went through the first 100 names in the Forbes 1000 list (ranked by Revenues) and found that 37 had some app store presence.

I then went through the next 100 and found that 61 out of top 200 companies had applications.

Finally, I went through the Interbrands top 100 brands of 2009 and found that 57 were officially promoted on the App Store.

What perhaps is telling is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are some companies that have multiple apps with sub-brands also listed.

The real question is not which brands are on the store, but why aren’t all of them there.


200k Apps by May 1

Jobs said that they have over 140k apps as of Jan 27th. The spider on 148apps.biz has been pretty accurate and it’s showing a bit over 150k apps as of today. Over 21k apps were added in January, with only December’s 25k apps beating it for the record.

The add rate was seen steadying around 10k/mo. during the latter half of last year, but I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that 20k/mo is the new norm. With the iPad coming on stream, I would not be surprised if Apple announces the 200k total sometime around May 1st.

On the app odometer, 100k will roll over every 5 months.


Apps are not Applications

Understanding the new world of apps. Apps are not Applications.

That should have been the first sign that the software market was changing. It’s obvious in retrospect; people were buying software that would make them laugh. This runs counter to the common understanding of an Application. An Application represents the developer’s best effort at creating software that applies the capabilities of the device to solving a specific problem. Making people laugh is not a problem an Application can solve; it’s not about the device it’s about the person using it.

Lots more clues here:

http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/67

I always said that the App is a new art form. As much art as desktop publishing and web design and home videos done by the masses. It’s not pretty but it’s real.