iPhone Users Share Download Behavior With Android Users, But Buy More Apps

AdMob is out with its latest Mobile Metrics Report, this time combining its readily available network data with survey results from over 1,000 users of iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices. Just for your reference, AdMob claims to serve ads for more than 7,000 mobile Web sites and 3,000 applications around the world.

Here are the takeaways from the July report, with some commentary of my own:

– App discovery is mostly done by perusing through the rankings on the App Store and Android Market >> not much of a surprise since it’s a centralized platform for something

Over 90% of users who browse the application storefronts do so from their mobile devices rather than their computer >> makes sense, because that’s where they end up too, but the percentage is very high regardless

– Android and iPhone users download 9-10 new apps per month, while iPod touch users download 18 on average. Furthermore, 22% of iPod Touch owning survey respondents download more than 20 free apps a month >> I’d expect downloading behavior to be similar for both platforms, but I have no clue why iPod Touch users would be inclined to download double the amount of apps than mobile phone users. (update: commenters suggest the younger demographic of iPod Touch owners likely install more games, boosting the average)

– Over half of Android and iPhone users spend more than 30 minutes per day using apps

– 19% of Android users download at least 1 paid app per month, compared to 50% of iPhone users and 40% of iPod Touch users >> this is the key finding in the report, although it would also be helpful to correlate these statistics with app pricing and actual revenue

– Users who regularly purchase paid apps spend an average of $9 on about 5 paid apps per month

– Dividing the average amount paid per month by the average number of paid apps downloaded yields an average app purchase price of about $1.80 >> this seems rather high

If you’d extrapolate the findings on app spending, which is not without risk considering the relatively small number of users surveyed, and combine them with estimated numbers of users of the devices / platforms, you could conclude that the App Store paid market is currently nearly $200 million per month (or approximately $2.4 billion a year) in size compared to $5 million per month (or $60 million on a yearly basis) for the Android Market.

Both strike me as overstated, particularly the estimated paid market size for Apple’s App Store, so I’d wager we need a bit more deep-delving analysis before reaching such conclusions.

You can download the full report here (PDF).