iTunes App Store: 100k Apps, But Only 20% Are Being Used
Apple today announced that the iTunes App Store now features over 100,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. App Store users have downloaded over 2 billion applications. While Apple is obviously celebrating this as a success of its developer program, AppsFire reminds us that only a very small number of these apps are hits. According to AppsFire, the majority of apps sits in the App Store's long tail, where 80% of the apps barely see any active installs.
According to AppsFire's data, only a small number of apps are installed on over 50% of iPhones and iPods. These are the usual suspects like the Facebook app or Shazam. The long tail, however, is very long. AppsFire's data shows that only 20,000 of the apps in the store are actually being used. The #1000 app was installed on less than 2% of all phones and iPods and there are still 99,000 apps with fewer active installs in the store.
While Apple uses games from Electronic Arts and the I Am T-Pain app as examples of highly popular applications, these apps also profited from instant name recognition and a built-in fan base. For other apps, getting discovered in the Apps Store is getting increasingly hard as the competition heats up. Besides bringing a rather lackluster version of the genius feature to the App Store, Apple also hasn't made any significant improvements to the app discovery experience in iTunes and the mobile store.
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Yap Yap 100K it's a big number but the question that we ask should we keep and developing apps for iPhone and hopping the someone will discover our app or Apple will solve the problem and will build a better discovery system for users.
I would edit this post's title to be:
iTunes App Store: 100k Apps, Only 20% Are Being Used, of that 20%, Only 1% Are Not Fart Apps
Numbers corrected:
20% of 100,000 = 20,000
1% of 20,000 = 200
( Which sounds exactly right. There are 200 Tweetdeck quality apps in the app store )
It seems from this article that this is Apple's fault while in reality, it is the developer's responsibility to market their own App.
Apple provides a development and distribution platform, true, a few Apps appear on their iPhone and iPod Touch ads, but for all the others, I have never seen a real marketing effort.
Only a few sites are making reviews, creating top 10 lists for specific functions, etc. The question is: What are the developers doing to advertise their Apps?
Nothing
"Besides bringing a rather lackluster version of the genius feature to the App Store, Apple also hasn't made any significant improvements to the app discovery experience in iTunes and the mobile store."
We still have to see such an initiative on any similar platform, Facebook is based on friends recommendations, Windows never advertises specific softwares other than filling the system with demos and trials (and you have to pay for your own platform distribution!).
Fibonacci is reputed to have created the 80/20 rule and in my business, 80% of my biggest problems are created by 20% of my clients. It seems no big whoop at all to me that 20% of the apps outsell 80% of the others.
Wow, the Pareto Principle to a tee.
Lorenzo, well put. I was thinking exactly the same thing.
How can you expect Apple to get all 100,000 apps in front of user's eyes? In my opinion, Apple is doing a decent job at showcasing some of the best apps.
What do we developers expect Apple to do? Make the home page one huge list of 100,000 random apps so that every body has equal attention? The takeaway from this shouldn't be to blame Apple but to realize that the app store has changed: its not a marketing platform anymore (like it was when there were only a few thousand apps), its a distribution platform. Sorry.
If you want to get noticed these days, don't bet on the app store. Get creative. Market your app like you would any other product. There are free, time consuming venues (Twitter, Blogging, Facebook, getting your app reviewed on prominent websites, etc.) and there are more traditional, expensive venues (namely, advertising). There are also creative combinations. I am about to implement a marketing strategy that involves a contest that would attract my target market, Facebook (via web and integrated with the app) to get free exposure while providing value, a beta test to get people talking, and blogging/Twitter to build buzz in the developer/tech community and open key connections. Though I'm still in the early stages, its been working very well. I'll be blogging my progress as I go.
Don't complain, get a brain, and develop a marketing strategy thats insane(ly great).
Not surprising since there are many spam apps according to other recent stories (37+ ebook version of just a single public domain book like Treasure island, publishers who have a different app wrapper around travel pages for different towns, etc). So is it spam or discovery that is the problem.
Would be interesting to compare to Android where there are only 10K+ apps. Are top 1K seeing 1.7% penetration or only 100.
Arguably, these numbers speak more to marketplaces in general (there is a high failure rate of new products in the market) than anything endemic to the platform.
That said, my personal belief at this point is that the 100K App milestone is the point when Apple should shift tactics and focus on something more meaningful than mere quantity, as subsequent numbers become less and less impactful, and we get it, "There's an App for That."
Otherwise, the 'magic' starts to become clinical and cold, which is very un-Apple-like, something that I blogged about in:
iPhone’s 100K Apps is the New '7-Minute Abs'
http://bit.ly/rJkEC
Check it out, if interested.
Mark
This the situation I predicted when everyone was raving over how revolutionary the app store is [sic]. Once the app store reached a certain scale getting noticed was always going to be just as difficult as the open web is for other platforms.
Big deal. Not everyone needs every app. I need a Hebrew prayer book and Tehillim (Psalms). How many of those are going to sell? What percentage of observant Jews have iPhones? But I won't buy a smartphone that can't offer them to me. Same goes for specialty real estate and medical apps, specialized business tools, hacker apps, etc. etc. The important thing is to be the platform that's being developed for. It used to be Palm, and now the iPhone has achieved that goal.