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.
And you can get the full report from here.