Distimo Report: The Four-Year Anniversary of the Apple App Store

Today we are happy to publish the latest Distimo Report, The Four-Year Anniversary of the Apple App Store.

In partnership with Distimo, we publish their monthly reports here on Ericsson Labs for the benefit of our developers.

Distimo wrote a publication one year ago about the rise of the application market in a number of East Asian countries. Over the course of the past year the application market in those same East Asian countries continued to grow at a high pace, while at the same time other markets also started to adopt smartphones. Distimo analyzed the application market in the top 30 countries over the course of the past year in terms of revenue, and found four emerging countries to be especially interesting: Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Turkey. All developers that develop for multiple markets should keep an eye on these countries, as they showed strong growth during the past year, and are likely to continue or even accelerate their growth.

In this month’s publication, they take a look back at how the Apple App Store emerged and developed over the past four years.

The major findings are:

• The Apple App Store currently has over 650k applications available, however due to emerging competition, the number of downloads among the top 200 most popular applications per available app in the Apple App Store for iPhone decreased from 15.4 at its height to 8.4 in June 2012.
• The United States has been the largest market for iPhone since launch, but has lost some ground in terms of its total significance over the past two years. Approximately 26 percent 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.
• Localization continues to be of the utmost importance for developers who wish to succeed in many non-English speaking countries.
• The potential for growth for developers grew over the past two years from 7.7M to 16.8M 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 percent, representing a lower net revenue of 5%.
• Looking at the aggregated revenue among the top 100 highest grossing applications in all countries, the total revenue more than tripled over the past two years. The increase is solely driven by in-app purchases, 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.

For full details of this month's report, click here.