Survey Says Most iPhone Owners Download 10+ Apps
In the mobile world, it's been long established that applications are the key selling point for Apple's iPhone. At the end of June the company reported a record 5.2 million iPhones sold in its third quarter - a 600% increase over the same time frame a year earlier. Steve Jobs was proud to announce that more than 1.5 billion applications had been downloaded from the App Store. Unsurprisingly, according to a new survey released by Compete, 72% of iPhone owners have downloaded 10 or more applications to their devices. Meanwhile, in comparison only 27% of Blackberry owners have downloaded 5 or more applications.
The day I purchased my iPhone I'd already downloaded more than 10 applications. To deny this curiosity for new features seems strange. While Blackberry's App World selection certainly doesn't compete with Apple's App Store, the company does offer free fan favorites like Facebook, Google Talk and Pandora. We were shocked by the Blackberry's low application download numbers and as explained by Compete's Danielle Nohe, it appears that the companies have remarkably different cultures.
Said Nohe, "With the massive number of applications downloaded to date, the iPhone has taken an early lead in getting owners to adopt app functionality and make popular applications a part of their daily lives...Once users are hooked, they're very unlikely to give up their device - that makes mobile the next can't miss opportunity for marketers."
Compete affirms ReadWriteWeb's statement that iPhone owners are embracing paid apps. The research company suggests that users prefer to pay less than $5 dollars per app with the most popular downloads being entertainment, gaming, music, social networking and weather applications. With the iPhone's culture of app downloading, it's obvious why developers covet the featured paid app spot in any one of these categories.
The top free application in the App Store's social networking category is Facebook and 71% of those surveyed reported accessing the site from their mobile device. Nevertheless, Twitter usage appeared remarkably lower than expected. Compete reports that 85% of smartphone owners still prefer to access Twitter from their computer rather than their mobile device. "Of the smartphone owners who do access Twitter via their phones, 41 percent use the application to keep track of what their friends are doing, 32 percent use the service to keep up with current events and 19 percent tweet from their handset to build a fan base or promote their company." Given Facebook's recent slew of Twitter-like features, and the fact that Twitter has no official mobile application, perhaps the microblogging site is seen as a redundancy amongst this group.
Another interesting fact is that nearly half of the group was open to receiving location-based discounts and advertisements. Communities like Foursquare and Brightkite have already been exploring such ads as a revenue model. However, it will be interesting to see if they try to place their own ads or outsource the sponsorships to a location-based ad serving network.
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The statistics for Blackberry are very surprising. I was under the impression that Blackberry has a much better user and web interface than Apple. Why is it then that the numbers are so low?
I think 10 apps is an understatement - new iPhone users are generally hungry for apps and download many more than that - although it depends on age group I think. Younger owners tend to download that number of games alone I'd suggest.
Glad to see your reference to iPhone owners embracing paid apps although sadly the link doesn't work :(
Matt
http://www.iphone-fun.co.uk
If anyone's considering writing mobile apps for money, I recommend reading the following article: http://www.money-era.com/2009/06/writing-mobile-apps-for-money/
I have about 10 pages of app on my iPod Touch and my friends with iPhones have even more. I think 10 apps per iPhone user is an underestimate. I am surprised by the Blackberry numbers.
BlackBerry users don't care as much about appliations.
We can easily find our way back to our car without an application. We can easily figure out 20% tip at a restaurant without an application. We read our morning news so we know what the weather will be like for the rest of the day. We (mostly) work on computers all day, so there is no need for Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, or any other social networking app. We don't need to play games because we have to take care of our businesses.
All we need is a good calendar to remind us of our meetings, deadlines, tasks, etc. We also need a good email app so we can check our emails at all times. Besides that, there is no need for all the applications that Apple offers, we don't need them.
Personally, I'm not a big iPhone guy. Not because I don't think they're great, but because I think I'd get addicted to it! Plus, I'm not a big fan of the iPhone's monthly cost. I have a Blackberry, which seems like a dinosaur compared to the iPhone, and I'm perfectly fine with it, but if I had the option to download apps, connect with others I'd be on the phone all day long! Lots of my colleagues have iPhones, so it gave me the idea to blog about iPhone insurance policies (here's the post: http://blog.insweb.com/2009/08/looking_for_iphone_3g_insuranc.html). I could imagine how many free apps are downloaded. Over the lifetime of the iPhone, I would imagine most consumers would download at least 15-20. And with mobile apps helping freelance programmers earn money, there will be no shortage of creative new apps.
Only during the first 30 minutes of use of the phone. I have 8 pages worth of apps that I use regularly so it's fun to see numbers like these come out. When you're out there doing things with the phone you find that you need certain things more and others less, so it's fun to see what works and what does not and then get into a habit of swapping in and swapping out what you're not using. With iTunes 9 and the ability to arrange things more now it's easier to simply set up what you need/use quicker and remove what you don't.
Mike
I think 10 application is not does any problem in iphone so mostly persons are Download the 10 applications in iphone and i also have a iphone & in my iphone i have 15 applications like some browsers, games, java applications, then also it doesn't get hanged and also not seen me any prob in my mob..