busted loop

Yesterday TechCrunch ran a story based on the June 2009 App Store Report, published by Distimo. The report examines price characteristics of the App Store throughout June and it has some great info. You should grab a copy, its free.

We've been working on some cool projects using App Store metrics and we're excited to see that we're not the only ones. In this article we're going to take a closer look at price changes in June using our own data.

In his post iPhone App Prices Fluctuate As Developers Adjust To OS 3.0; Nav Apps Gain Pricing Power Erick Schonfeld points to a graph that shows the total value of all apps in the "Top 100 Paid" list and notes that the aggregate price is fluctuating wildly. We've been paying attention to this metric ourselves, and have found that when compared to the "Top 100 Paid" lists for individual categories, the Top 100 overall is one of the most stable.

Here's a graph with the aggregate price for the "Top 100 Paid" along with the same measurement for a few categories. We've chosen categories that had some interesting changes in June (click to open a really huge version).

A couple of things to note:

1. Medical apps are expensive!

2. Prices within category specific Top 100 lists are much more unstable than the Top 100 Paid overall

3. Even though Distimo's report makes the Top 100 price seem erratic, it's partially due to the scale of their graph.

Look at this graph of the daily change rate for the Top 100's total price. In the past month it barely hit 10%.

Furthermore, within the category Top 100 lists there is a lot of instability being caused by just a few high priced apps. As these apps cross the #100 threshhold they move in and out of the list and have a big impact on the total price. This is not the case for the overall Top 100 paid list, which sees expensive apps introduced far less frequently.

Referring back to the first graph, we have been able to identify the cause of every increase and decrease in price within category Top 100 lists. It would be boring to read (or write) about all of them, so we picked just a few interesting ones to show you. Check out the annotated graph and details below:

1. Proloquo2Go, with a price of $149.99, had a two-day stint in the Top 100 Paid Educational category.

2. Shortly after initial release MobileNavigator Europe became a Top 100 Paid Navigation app, with a price tag of $94.99.

3. The same Navigation app, MobileNavigator Europe, was increased to $139.99.

The Distimo report attributes this Navigation price spike to Apple allowing turn by turn navigation, and it's interesting to see that almost all of the increase was due to a single app.

TechCrunch concludes that Nav apps are gaining pricing power, and we agree. Navigation app prices will increase as publishers add valuable turn-by-turn features and big players like TomTom and Garmin bring new products online.

 

 

Did you know that there are over 52,000 apps in the iTunes App Store? Over 14,000 publishers? Or that 1% of publishers are responsible for over 30% of apps? Did you know that the App Store is currently growing by more that 1,300 apps per week?

Fun with numbers!

I love digging into brand new data when the only strategy is to dive in and explore. The output of every query is a real discovery.

It's even better when its a huge pack of exclusive data about a cutting edge and very trendy topic. Today it's the iTunes App Store, which has been a subject of much study this year. Pinch Media published a presentation that gives some insight into how app ranking translates to daily downloads, and a recent report by MobClix examines the distribution of users among the 2,309 free apps they track. Both of these are based the subset of apps in their "network" and are not necessarily representative of the App Store as a whole.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on comprehensive, raw ranking data for the entire US App Store, spanning all the different categories. I have many days of it, but so far I've only begun to look at a single snapshot. Just for fun, here's a chart of paid vs free across all categories:


And here's another one with just games, by genre. Remember, games can appear in more than one genre:


Now that I've got you hooked with some colorful pictures, let's dig in deeper.

Clearly the majority of apps are not free. Yet if you browse any category in the App Store and sort by "Most Popular" you'll see that there are lots of free apps near the top. Below is a breakdown of paid vs free for the top 100 apps in each category.


Even though the majority of apps cost money, the majority of the "most popular" apps are free. To compensate for this, I'd expect there to be a concentration of paid apps at the bottom of the popularity curve. To test this theory, lets check out the 200 least popular apps in each category. (Games are omitted. Multiple genres makes it just a little tricky, and I'm keeping it simple for now)


This is starting to get exciting! Notice how most of the categories have no free apps at all in the bottom 200. It turns out that at the bottom of every category there are pages and pages of paid apps, uninterrupted by even a single free app. See for yourself - pick any category, sort by popularity, and click through the pages looking for free apps. It may take up to 50 pages depending on which category you chose, but you'll eventually find a page that has only paid apps. Keep on clicking and you'll see that this continues all the way to the last page.

We call this segment of paid-only apps in each category the "dead zone". App Store popularity is based on daily download rate, so the apps in the dead zone for each category have fewer daily downloads than even the least popular free app in that category.

So how many times per day are apps in the dead zone downloaded? Well, since the vast majority of downloads are for apps near the top, we assume that the least popular free apps in each category have very few downloads per day. Probably none.

Another interesting thing we noticed is that the size of the dead zone, and the percentage of paid apps that die varies quite a bit across categories. Here's another paid vs free chart with the dead zone carved out. I've also added a line showing the mortality rate based on total paid apps in each category. (You can click this chart to open a larger version)

If you're an iPhone App developer you may be wondering "What does this mean to me?", and you've probably got a hunch that it's not good news. Our interpretation is that most paid apps fail. These "dead" apps may have had some sales shortly after they were released, but once the honeymoon is over, that's it. No more sales.

I'd love to hear your feedback on this analysis, especially if you're the publisher of an app currently in the dead zone. Is it true that these apps are failures? Let us know!