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Distimo Report: The evolution of Apple’s App Store

By: , IntoMobile
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012 at 2:35 AM

The latest Distimo Report looks at Apple’s App Store, four years after it was unveiled alongside iOS 2.0 (then iPhone OS). At launch, it had only 500 applications and today it counts more than 650,000 titles. Here are the highlights from the report:

  • Due to emerging competition, the number of downloads among the top 200 most popular applications decreased from 15.4 at its height to 8.4 in July 2012.
  • Approximately 26% of the free downloads worldwide originated from the United States in the Apple App Store for iPhone during June 2012.
  • The top 10 largest countries for downloads of the top 200 most popular free applications now consists of United States, China, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Italy, Australia and South Korea.
  • The potential for growth for developers grew over the past two years from 7.7 million to 16.8 million daily downloads among the top 200 most popular free applications per country. However, the figures for paid downloads only increased by 13% while the average selling price declined by 16%, representing a lower net revenue of -5%.
  • The total revenue among the top 100 highest grossing application more than tripled over the past two years. The increase is solely driven by in-app purchases, and the proportion of revenue that is derived from free applications featuring in-apps increased from 7% to 68%.
  • The shift to in-app purchases has been driven largely by Games, which have the most in-app purchase options on average from within the app. About 21% of all free games feature in-app purchases, but when looking at the 300 most popular free applications in each category in the United States in June 2012, 77% of those Games features in-app purchases.

Distimo Report: The evolution of Apple\'s App Store

And you can get the full report from here.

About The Author

Dusan Belic

Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following the latest trends in the industry. The "convergence" is what he's most excited about, and writing about it is the next logical thing to do. He thinks that using a smartphone is what everyone who cares about their time should do. In addition to his interests in mobile phones, Dusan also loves to experiment with the latest web and mobile 2.0 services. The idea of accessing and managing your information from any device no matter where you are simply amazes him. Whether it's an online to-do list, note taking service or a video sharing social network, he's there to try it out. He admits though, he's still searching for the ultimate web-based organizational tool, which "sings" perfectly with the mobile PIM application. Dusan used to run SymbianWatch.com which later became part of IntoMobile. He lives in Serbia, South-East Europe, from where he edits the site on a daily basis.