Counting iPhone Apps Is Not A Game

We read this article on VentureBeat and that 62,965 total apps number just didn't sound right... so we dug into the data and found the total number of apps appearing in the US app store is 55,977 as of about 3pm this afternoon.

Dean Takahashi, author of the VentureBeat article, based his number on Mobclix data. The Mobclix reports can be misleading because they don't filter for uniqueness. Some apps appear in multiple categories: a single app can appear in the Entertainment category AND in the Action sub-genre of Games, for example.

Games are special in this regard. There are no cases of an app that's not classified as a game being in more than one category. For our purposes we only count apps as "Games" if they do not appear in another

non-game category. There are roughly 3,000 apps in this overlap area, which leaves 10,175 apps that are exclusively categorized as games.

So, about 56,000 apps and somewhere between

10,000 and 13,000 of them are games (depending on how you count). This graph will give you an idea of the growth rate for the different segments, showing the  number of unique apps each day for past month.

Special bonus feature! The total price of apps over that same time period.

Where can you get two weeks of iTunes App Store data?

Right here! See links below to download App Store rankings for over 50,000 apps.

The iTunes App Store is changing rapidly. There are thousands of new apps every week, and the number of new publishers is keeping pace. At the same time, apps disappear from the app store every day. Apps move up and down in popularity, change price, and even shift from one category to another. It's a churning urn of burning funk!

We have lots of App Store data and we love digging around in it. Some of you find this stuff really interesting too, so we offer you some raw data in the hope that you will find it useful, and that you'll derive something interesting and share it with us. We've packaged up two recent snapshots of our ranking data from the US iTunes App Store, one week apart.

Download file #1US AppStore July 2

Download file #2US AppStore June 25

If you're unfamiliar with the structure of the App Store, these notes may be helpful:

1. Apps are organized into categories
2. The Games category has a number of sub-categories
3. Apps can belong to multiple categories
4. Rankings are relative to other apps in the same category
5. There are other ranked lists that contain apps across multiple categories

The data is de-normalized, and is presented in as simple a format as possible. Each record consists of:

• Category name
• Rank
• App
• Price

Questions are welcomed, critique appreciated, insights revered. So download our data, pop it in a spreadsheet or database or whatever your flavor, and get back to us with your results!

UPDATE: 7/16/09 check out the new data, world wide!

What's a "mobile app"? You mean "iphone app"?

The term "mobile app" is starting to become commonplace. I can use it with my dad and he knows what I mean. People have heard enough in the press and done enough shopping in the iTunes store to get the idea of buying software for a cell phone. But will Apple, who indirectly coined the term "podcast" with their omnipresent iPod, do the same thing with the iPhone?

Here you can see that people started looking around for information about mobile apps back in the middle of 2007.

Zero to 6.00 in two years, looks like pretty serious popularity growth.

It's important to always get some context, so I picked the first other term that came to mind.

Apparently if I'd been using the term "iPhone app" instead my dad would have understood me a lot sooner.

Here's a graph with iphone, palm, and android apps for the past 30 days:

Getting back to the original question of "iphone" becoming the "Q-tips®" of mobile, here's one last search trend for you to ponder:

This doesn't necessarily mean anything, but google trends is fun to play with.