Distimo launched a new report on state of the apps in 2010, covering all of the major application stores, including Apple’s AppStore, RIM’s BlackBerry App World, Google’s Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Palm’s App Catalog and Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Here are the major findings:
- Apple grew the most in 2010 in terms of the absolute number of applications, while the runners-up show more growth in terms of percentages. The Apple App Store for iPhone doubled its total during the past year to almost 300,000 applications, while the total number of applications available for Android, almost 130,000, is 6 times the number of applications available one year ago. BlackBerry App World and Nokia Ovi Store showed triple digit growth in the last year as well, reaching nearly 18,000 applications and 25,000 applications, respectively.
- The high download volumes of free applications appear to attract developers to switch to ad-supported business model.
- The top 300 free applications generated over 3 million downloads each day (average) during December 2010, while only 350,000 paid applications are downloaded daily. However, paid downloads increased almost 30% more than free downloads in the top 300 when comparing the download figures of December 2010 to those of June 2010.
- Comparing June data to that of December, we see that the share of revenue generated by in-app purchases from the most grossing free applications more than doubled for both the iPhone and iPad. At the same time, the share of revenue generated by in-app purchases from free applications is much smaller on iPad (15%) compared to iPhone (34%).
- Although the proportion of free applications grew, the average price of the applications also declined.
- The Angry Birds series is the most popular game with a total of six appearances in the top lists of all stores. Facebook is the most popular non-game application with six appearances as well.
And you can download Distimo’s complete report from their website.