Thanks to 148apps.biz we know how many apps are being submitted to the App Store.
For the year so far the average has been almost exactly 20k apps per month. Toward the last half of last year, 10k/mo was the norm.
14 Percent of App Store apps target the iPad
Nov 5, ’10
10:04 AM
From Distimo (registration required):
- The number of applications in the Apple App Store has grown from just under 200,000 in April 2010 to over 300,000 in October 2010.
iOS users downloading 17.6 million apps/day. Songs, not so much.
Sep 5, ’10
1:56 PM
Thirty days after the launch of the iTunes App Store, Apple announced that 60 million apps were downloaded in the first month of operations generating sales of $30 million. “This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” Jobs said adding that it may be a “$1 billion marketplace at some point in time.”
Mr. Jobs was being modest.
To see how modest we have the following data:
If the current download rate is maintained (17 million apps/day) and if the pricing of $0.29/app is preserved, then $1.8 billion will have been spent on iOS apps this year.
With the rate of downloads increasing as steeply as it is, $2 billion in sales is not unlikely in the third year of the store. Twice what Jobs was predicting for “some point in time”.
The other line in the graph is the iTunes music download rate. I’ve written about it before and pointed out that the point of inflection in the download rate coincided with the increase in price for songs from $0.99 to $1.29. Not much more to say here except that the trend continues and music downloads continue to slow.
As far as Apple is concerned, the slowdown in iTMS is more than offset by the increase in iTAS. As far as the music industry is concerned, I don’t think CD sales are increasing. Does anyone know?
54 apps have been downloaded for every iOS device sold
Sep 5, ’10
1:40 PM
At the September 1st music event, Apple announced that 6.5 billion apps were downloaded and that there had been 120 million iOS devices sold.
This works out to 54 apps per iOS device.
On June 7 Apple reported 5 billion apps over 100 million iOS devices or an average of 50 apps for iOS device.
On April 8th, I computed that the app attach rate was 47.
Is this rate noteworthy?
Let’s rewind to two years ago. August 27th, 2008, soon after the App store launched.
Nokia had just declared that its users had downloaded over 90 million applications over the past 2 years. An analyst estimated that over 100 million users globally use Nokia smartphones/converged devices, implying an attach rate of less than 1 app/smartphone.
My, how expectations have changed.
Revisiting the App Forecast
Aug 20, ’10
2:25 PM
From a forecast I made on March 21st: 300k Apps Approved by August:
My initial estimate in February for the 200k milestone was by May 1st. I was clearly off by nearly 40 days. If the add rate is maintained at 20k/mo 300k will come around in August although I’m not as confident in this forecast. The rate of app addition seems to be accelerating.
As of today the Approved app counts are as follows:
AppShopper: 297,165
148apps.com: 296,662
148apps.biz: 296,157
The monthly rate of addition is shown in the following graph:
The 20k/month has been steady during the last 7 months so I think the last 4k apps will be added in the next week, making the 300k roll-over in August, as forecast. The approval rate did not accelerate however but stayed pretty steady. There was a similar plateau in the middle of last year around 10k apps/month.
