Apps on the iPhone are huge. We know that. As if we needed more proof, Apple moved its billionth app earlier this afternoon. But some recent data from Compete suggests that smartphone owners who don’t have an iPhone, apparently don’t love apps. Or at least, don’t download them.
If you look at the graph below, you’ll see that iPhone owners are very diversified in the number of apps they download. Some have only 1-5, some 6-10, some over 31 (that’s me — several times over), etc. But look at the other phones surveyed. A lot of them haven’t downloaded any apps. And those that don’t have zero, seem to prefer downloading only 1-5.
Now you see why all of the other smartphone manufacturers are rushing to get their own app store solutions. Of the phones in this list, only BlackBerry has a real rival app store right now — and it just launched. It’s worth noting that Google’s Android platform was not included in the quarterly survey of 1,000 smartphone owners. Its app store, Android Market, has seen the second most amount of activity in terms of downloads behind the iPhone. But it is far behind the iPhone.
The other question asked in the survey is also somewhat interesting. While iPhone users love apps, they’re apparently not as willing to pay as much for them as much as other smartphone owners are. For exmple, 16% of Motorola smartphone owners said they would spend over $50 on an app. Only 1% of iPhone owners would pay that price. Of course, iPhone owners are spoiled with a ton of apps priced much less than that. Motorola users, forced to live in a barren wasteland of basically no apps, will gladly pay for something, anything, apparently.
cuz 99% of peeps don’t know where to go to DL apps. And once you do find out where to go, the experience sucks or the price is crazy (talkin at you Handango)
GetJar – 400 million apps downloaded, 33 million last month and rate of download increasing every month. A lot of those downloads are for feature phones.
It’s a chicken and egg scenario. Developers are not going to spend a ton of effort developing for other platforms until they get some traction (and make it as easy as Apple has) – and users aren’t going to care until more apps are built. iPhone has the right sauce in this cook-off, the others would do well to steal the recipe.
And they’re trying right now. But Apple is also a good cook.
And the best cook is one who can stand apart from the others though his recipes be stolen.
Please tell me you don’t mean to say Apple has a kitchen patent?
And the best cook is one who can stand apart from the others though his recipes be stolen. Apple is one!
Of course it helps that the cook has locked the doors to the restaurant so you can’t get out…
didnt i read that 99% of people that download apps, only do it to check weather or something? the rest of the apps are useless…
that’s not exactly right, but yeah, a lot of people do use the weather app a lot.
Come on MG! You can’t tell me that the iPhone AppStore is not full of crappy software written by people who are looking to make a quick buck by releasing an app for 99 cents that is a complete throwaway after the first time that you use it.
What Apple did (which is plain genius) is create an AppStore that does not really act like a store. You can not test the apps and you can not return the apps (easily at least). That causes people to think that spending the time to return the app and get the refund is not really worth their time (which generally speaking, it does not). Meanwhile, the $15-$30 applications that are truly useful are buried in the AppStore. Meanwhile, Apple makes money due to the volume of purchases.
Look, I own about 400 apps (paid apps) ranging in price from 99 cents to $20.00 and I currently have on my iPhone only 8 of them.
There are 35,000 apps in the App Store. Sure, a lot are junk, but a lot are really good. The trick is finding them — Apple needs to do a better job at that. But there are a ton of high quality apps that simply would not have existed without the store. And there still is a lot of talk about the more premium area of the store for those.
Other carriers (verizon anyone) wanted too much of a cut of any mobile app. whoever was able to sell this idea to ATT and let them allow the iphone app store was salesperson of the year.
I believe the man your looking for is a one S.Jobs
Which platform are you referring to? I believe the most popular classes of apps for iPhone are games and social networking.
I read a report in march that looked at stats for the game Tap Tap Revenge, which revealed it had been downloaded by an estimated 34% of all iPhone users.
I downloaded the Blackberry App World to check it out. Conclusion, bad ui and bad selection. It was so hard to find decent apps that were reasonably priced. I wonder if developers think they can charge more for blackberry apps because they are associated more with business users than iPhones.
Probably.
MG, that is probably the dumbest thing that has come out of your mouth and extremely irresponsible!
The fact that an app sells for 99 cents on the app store is because it has to. If it does not, there are 10 copies of that app or someone will copy it and sell it for 99 cents. The concept of a price on AppStore is the same concept of wholesale in any other industry. Wholesalers work on a lower profit margin but sell a lot more product that way.
If you really believe that software that took months to develop, test, market, and sell is not worth more than 99 cents (or anywhere between 99 cents and 4.99 which seems to be the magic selling price based on an article that TC had a couple of months ago), then you are very much mistaken.
The fact that software on other platforms is more expensive is because there is less competition and not because it is being sold to business people and not to general consumers. If the AppStore had only about 5000 apps, I guarantee to you that the prices would be more expensive. But with 35,000 apps, the law of supply and demand kicks in (I double majored in Engineering and Economics).
Apple did a lot of great things with the iPhone but it also caused for the work of many developers to be very much de-valued. I look at some of the apps on the AppStore and think to myself that if I was the developer, I would never have even attempted to create ,sell these apps in the first place. You look at some of the games out there and you figure that it takes several months to develop them and then the developer prices them at 7.99 and it does not sell so he lowers the price to 1.99 and it starts selling somewhat but when he lowers it to 99 cents, it sells like crazy and you start thinking that all of the apps on the AppStore are on a Fire Sale.
Developers who charge the price for their apps that they feel needs to be charged are not necessarily thinking to themselves that “Because I am selling to a business person, I can make it more expensive”. They are simply exercising the law of supply and demand and value their software based on their efforts. For you to suggest otherwise is just plain irresponsible!
A couple of different angles to ponder for this:
1) What is the difference between your average iPhone user and another smartphone user?
Are the other smartphones seen as more business oriented? Do their users see them that way?
What are the demographics of the users of iPhone like in comparison to, say, your average crackberry or Palm user.
According to apple the most popular iPhone apps are all trivial stuff like games and what not.
http://www.appl.../index_top.html
2) Do other smartphone users not download apps because the phone comes with everything they need already anyway?
One final comment: Why no Android entry?
I asked about no android, haven’t heard back yet. Obviously, that’s an odd omission. As for point 2, i would say the phones definitely don’t come with everything they want, they just need better app store/experiences.
Where are the numbers for Windows Mobile based smart phones?
Seriously people!!! Windows Mobile accounted for 12.4% of all mobile phone sales in Q4 2008 and it is not included on this?
This can not be a fair comparison. The iPhone is more of a computer than it is a cell phone. RIM and Palm can not come close to it when it comes to computing power which means that there are less apps that can be developed for them. The only other platform that has the computing power and development support is Windows Mobile but it is not even mentioned. The other platform is the Android platform and it is not mentioned either.
How can this be reliable and credible enough for TC to put it as reliable information? It leaves out capable platforms and gives the iPhone the bias that it apparent in most media these days.
TC should have never published this without at least questioning why Windows Mobile is missing!
There are a lot of apps for Windows Mobile (but less than the iPhone), but come on – do you really think the numbers are any different than any of these other smartphones? I very highly doubt it.
The only one that is likely different is Android because it has an app store. When Microsoft launches its app store then its number will be worth looking at. Until them, might as well bunch it in with the rest of them.
How can you do that? My daughter has a Samsung VUE that has about 30-40 apps available for download for it. At last count, there are over 18000 Windows Mobile apps (this is from the Windows Mobile press team…).
Just because they do not have an AppStore, you can not disregard it or claim to bundle it with phones that do not have the platform, development, or capability to support applications of all types.
Why dismiss it?
Right about half the number of iPhone apps — which launched 9 months ago. I think the fact that Microsoft is making an app store says enough about its strategy there. If it were successful with apps as is, why bother? I’ve used plenty of apps on Windows Mobile — and you say the App Store is full of crap?
MG, The fact that the AppStore is an amazing sales tool for apps is undeniable. But, it is not the only method of purchasing apps on other platforms. Vendors have been selling apps for Windows Mobile. RIM, and Palm and with considerable success.
The research that you presented had to do with how much people are willing to pay and how much they are purchasing. If the number of purchased apps on the Windows Mobile platform was close to zero then how come there are around 18000 apps written for it?
All I am saying is that there is obviously a market place there which was overlooked by this research and you when writing this article. If you could ask about Android, you should have asked about Windows Mobile as well.
You call yourself a journalist and you use self assumptions to write articles ?
Reminds me of that article here about J school not needed.
I have a Storm (to my embarrassment) and have downloaded zero apps. Apple does it well I think because they’re a computer company at heart, as opposed to mobile manufacturers like RIM.
hey i like that zero star t-shirt you have in the picture
Yeah, paying homage to my youth.
thumbs up
Does “all smartphone” equal “RIM” + Palm + Motorola ?
If so, what about stats for Nokia and/or S60 ?
When I first read your twitter for this blog post I thought you were talking about an app named “Zero” that I could download for my iPhone. LOL
(Doing my part to a new group above the “31+ apps downloaded” group on iPhone bar)
I actually downloaded several apps for my Palm Treo when I had one, but the experience was cumbersome and ugly… the App Store makes it fun… and more like a collection game.
Ha. Me too.
“zero remains a popular app download”
BTW, I have around 15 apps on my Nokia N82 (not represented in these stats) – it’s pretty much all I need.
QUALITY not quantity, folks!
Was this survey paid for by Apple perchance?
MG Siegler,
Your website (http://mgsiegler.com) is kinda buggy. Clicking on “+” sign doesn’t show article details.
Looked into it and I guess the value of href is probably wrong. It doesn’t point to techcrunch for sure.
That’s just a silly Tumblr default theme design. But thanks for the feedback.
How is the t-shirt image from zero skateboards relevant?
The iPhone is a toy, who’s surprised?
I wanted an original iPhone bad enough that I was the first person in my little TOWN to get one when they were released, and I am in the zero app downloads club. It just does everything I want already, except for having a miserable surfing experience because of the small screen. Where’s that Newton-sized iPhone Max, or whatever? Something like that and I might think about doing more things with iPhone OS. As it is, I have an ancient 15″ G4 400 tiBook that I take in a Targus pack when I need real internet away from home.
Apple continues to lead the way smart phones, but I wish they didn’t impose so much regulation on developers. It’s kinda annoying how they are so stringent regarding logos and copyrights. http://iamned.com/blog/ AAPL had a huge quarter and recession could be over.
The sample size is alarmingly small. 43 Palm smartphone owners? 5% of that is about 2 people. Same for Motorola. 16% of 53 is fewer than 10 people.
I did not read the original survey stats. But if the same number of people were answering both questions, 100/104 IPhone people are willing to pay, vs. 53/84 Motorola users. IPhone users are much more willing to pay than others.
Also the numbers don’t add up, the phone-specific charts only account for half of the data. I wonder which are the other phones in this survey, and why they don’t get specific graphs. There aren’t that many Smartphone brands out there, at least to account for a few hundred more smart phones.
So Nokia and Symbian are not significant enough to make it into your charts?
How ignorant can you be?
I wonder if the non-iPhone numbers are artificially low because there isn’t a defined app download experience for these users — no memorable trip to the app store. If we’re including free apps, I don’t know a single RIM user who hasn’t downloaded at least one to their phone (be it Facebook or a Google search/chat/email/maps application).
FWIW, I don’t play games on my phone and haven’t paid for a single one of the Symbian apps I’ve installed and use regularly on my Nokia N82 (Sportstracker, Twibble, GMaps, NokiaMaps, Shozu, Skype, Joiku, Fring, Gmail, Emoze, Google Search, Opera…) – why would I ?
I agree with you. This faux comparison holds no water without Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Android.
I have about 10 apps that I use regularly for my Nokia 5800 and most were free downloads,. However they were downloaded from various providers and sites so they do not count towards some arbitrary number of aggregated Symbian downloads.
There is too much hype about the 1 billion apps being downloaded… how many were actually paid apps for Apple?
“…how many were actually paid apps for Apple?”
By my estimate based on public information, fewer than 10% of the billion cumulative downloads were for paid apps. At an average price of around $2.50/app, this would result in a gross of $250M and a net of $75M for Apple.
Stunning that Windows Mobile 7 hasn’t made more traction here.
I believe the most popular classes of apps for iPhone are games and social networking. and the best company apple in iphone
I have a P1i . I have downloaded more than 10 apps. Wonder how many I would have downloaded on the iphone ? Iphone is priced adsurdly in india and am waiting for the new version and price reduction in July to move over.
why download apps if your phone can do everything out of the box?
the iphone solved an important problem which is the main cause of low downloads in traditional phones.. which is content discovery.
Also they made the content purchase experience very very good…. on most operator decks this is a bitch!
Overall they have shown that the operator lead model for content sales has have a serious look at itself.
The main reason the iPhone fares so well in this survey is that there are a TON of free apps in the App Store (over 90% of them are free, in fact). Other surveys have shown that two-thirds of iPhone owners don’t buy any paid apps at all for their phone.
If other platforms had as many free apps available, I think you’d see the numbers even out a bit, though I expect the iPhone would still have the edge here.
Even if you ignore the tiny sample sizes and the lack of some key platforms (Moto but no Nokia? Must be a US survey I guess) – this is really terrible writing, twisting the stats.
“Zero remains a popular number” and the rest all clearly are aimed at suggesting no-one but iPhone users download apps. The numbers actually show that betwen 2/3rds and 3/4s of non-iPhone users do download applications – higher than I’d have guessed and certainly pretty respectable!
Stating that Android comes second in app store downloads, and then not showing any Android stats in the graph, is just another crude way to over-emphasise a point. Of course here you do have the slight excuse that no-one is really buying Android phones…
The overall general outline of your argument does exist but this kind of writing comes across as zealotry rather than journalism.
MG: I for one would like to see a bit more detail on the research survey that is cited (I mean this generally, not just for this article. In this case I see it’s from Complete, it’s quarterly, and it has a 1000 respondents. But (like a few others here) I am a bit suspicious, mainly because I really don’t know if the survey methodology is rigorous, and because some vendors are left out (Android, etc.).
I think you are doing a great job of covering the topics (i.e., timely), and I enjoy the brevity and crisp style, but a bit more detail on the stats would be welcomed.