Distimo report: The Need for Cross App Store Publishing, and introducing AppLink

Today we are happy to publish the latest Distimo Report, The Need for Cross App Store Publishing, and introducing AppLink.

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

Distimo AppLink is a new first-of-its-kind, easy-to-use cross-platform app store distribution service that provides developers with a one-stop shop for detailed insight into their app distribution and analytics and their app sales funnel. Developers who use AppLink can create and communicate one single short URL for apps that are available on multiple platforms, and can also track consumers who want their application on platforms that are not yet supported by the developer. AppLink provides app publishers with detailed statistics about their marketing campaigns and the effectiveness of different channels, and also helps consumers easily share apps they discover with their friends, family and colleagues, regardless of the other person's mobile device.

Many companies have tried to enter the mobile app distribution market over the past few years, but only a handful of app stores have succeeded. After the initial success of the Apple App Store for iPhone three years ago, many app stores have failed and disappeared, while some late entrants like the Amazon Appstore launched and quickly found success.

The major findings are:

• The average daily download volume among the top 100 most popular free applications in the United States is 4M, while the average daily volumes in the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad are 82% and 20% respectively of Google Play (formerly Google Android Market). The app volumes in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and Amazon Appstore are fairly small compared to the millions of downloads in the other stores, and they are just 2% and 10%, respectively, of the volume of Google Play.
• The way download volume is distributed differs largely per app store: in most categories the free volume is higher in Google Play, while in others, the Apple App Store for iPhone wins, including among the largest categories like Games.
• The revenue among the top 200 highest grossing applications in the United States is distributed completely differently: the Apple App Store for iPhone is the largest with a daily turnover among the top 200 highest grossing applications of 1.9M USD, followed by the Apple App Store for iPad (64%) and Google Play (29%).
• The total number of applications across the six major app stores is 1.3M. There are 980K applications however, when looking at unique applications only. This means that every application is published 1.3 times on average across the different app stores. When looking at the top 300 applications, this cross-store ratio is much higher. For example, 89% of the top 300 free and top 300 paid applications in the Apple App Store for iPad are also available in the Apple App Store for iPhone.
• The top 10 most successful cross-store publishers in April 2012 include: Rovio Mobile Ltd., OMGPOP, Gameloft, Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft Corporation, Apple, ZeptoLab UK Limited, Disney and Adobe Systems Incorporated.