AppsFire, a service for sharing iPhone Apps with anyone, has conducted a survey of 1,200 users using the AppsFire service to find out key data on iPhone and iPod Touch users. AppsFire released a report taking data on real users and trends based on their usage patterns. The company gathered data on 1,200 users in July and August with respondents from across the globe with a high concentration in the United States (50%), France and Japan.
After looking at the reports, it’s interesting to note that 15,000+ applications have been installed through these 1,200 users. Through the 15,000+ applications overall, each user has about 65 applications installed per device. The average amount of money spent per device is $80, which after thinking about how many iPhone users are there, that’s about $400,000,000+ that Apple has made from paid applications, without taking their 30%. The average price of an iPhone app is $1.56, which seems about right according to AdMob data.
One really interesting note is that only 15,000+ apps are really installed (out of 65,000+) which makes people think about all the failed iPhone apps. AppsFire was co-founded by TechCrunch France founder Ouriel Ohayon and is based in Israel. You’ll find the entire report below.
Wow! This is great info, thanks Appsfire.
$80? Great. But $80 on average seems less when compared with the number of applications in the App store and the number of iPhone users. I feel this would still reduce.
Great information Appsfire!AppsFire released a report taking data on real users and trends based on their usage patterns. The average amount of money spent per device is $80, which makes us rethink about iPhone users. By seeing the overall applications, each user can have 65 applications installed per device. So,the average price of the iPhone app will be increased.
Thus iPhone is nowadays called as a small computer and it is used frequently throughout!
Why do you think this is great info?
This number is based solely on users who’ve installed the AppsFire *desktop* application. This is in no way is representative of an *average* user and therefor can’t be used to extrapolate information about the iPhone / iPod Touch community as a whole.
The proper title for this post is: How Much Does An iPhone/iPod Touch User who installs the AppFire desktop application Spend On Apps? $80
Clearly not quite as catchy, huh?
Seems a bit (slash a lot) overstated. 65 apps/user is somewhat believable but $80/user is out of control. Data must be largely impacted by the (early) early adopter sample they’re researching from, and not one representative of the actual user base. Perhaps it was a sample taken from users to their site, which would make a bit more sense.
I agree with you about the sample being largely early adopters, not sure though if I believe the 65 apps per user, that still seems a little high to me
$80?
Try $1500 for me since the launch of the App Store in 2007. Yes, I added them all up, and it was just over $1500 I’ve spent.
AppsFire crashed preference panel for a lot of users and didn’t work on windows early on. It seems right that it’s not a true picture of the typical iPhone user.
It also doesn’t work if you have encrypted backups, have a jail broken phone and god only knows what else.
http://Yappler.com/Sync lets you create an iPhone list but works reliably, can handle encrypted backups and jail broken phones.
Do you mind putting a disclaimer that you are behind the site that you’re plugging next time?
Bashing AppsFire and then plugging your service as a “by the way check this out” is not very honest.
Not a good way to make me a user…
So the app market is up to $3.3 billion per year from the $2.4 billion that was posted a week ago?
http://www.mobi...-the-app-store/
Both numbers are hard to believe.
Since 3.0 came out, I think I have spent about $80 between me and my GFs iPhone. We share an iTunes account which helps justify purchases easier.
The most expensive app I bought was OmniFocus which is $20. But it syncs to the desktop version via MobileMe or 3rd part webdav so its almost worth the price.
Beyond that, I bought Wolfenstein for like $4, F.A.S.T., Amateur Surgeon, Oregon Trail, Terminator, and of course a few of the only games that came with 3.0 like Super Monkey Ball and enigmo.
Not all of these purchases have been worth it. I was disappointed with the controls of Super Money Ball for example. If I could have requested a refund I would have done it. (without going through the hassle of it)
I am ok with spending a few dollars here and there on games. I would spend even more *IF* more developers created demos. It *VERY* rare that I will buy an app without playing a demo of it. More developers need to create demos of their application.
No fricking way. $80 per each user?
Most people I know spent maybe $10 in total on apps, many have spent nothing. $80 per user means there are users who spent well over $200 on apps.
Even amongst TechCrunch iPhone fanboys that doesn’t make any sense.
Why not? My iPhone is now the computer I use most frequently throughout the say (and night). It makes sense to load one’s most useful device up with necessary (and unnecessary) tools and delights. Also, remember, the iPhone is a gaming platform too. How much does the average gameboy user spend annually on games?
I agree. I estimate I’ve spent at least $20 on my iPod Touch apps, and probably much more. If I had an iPhone I’d probably buy more (both those apps that use iPhone-only features and those apps that only make sense to use when you have more than wifi connectivity), and I’ve had my iPod for less time (~8 months) than a lot of iPhone owners. I can totally see the $80 average.
Has TechCrunch changed it’s policy on Apple?
Two Posts on same day, where is Michael A?
I am a Palm Pre user but iPhone users (including a certain ex-iphone user) should comment on how much they spent… it would maybe help validate this a little bit.
Guesstimating…I’ve spent well over $100 in the course of a year (iBird Pro was $30), I have about 10 paid games, I have about 5 of the top “pro” Twitter apps, and a smattering of misc paid utilities. It adds up quickly.
65 apps/user!? This has to be a heavily, heavily biased sampling. I don’t think the average among the general iPhone population is anywhere near that. (I’d also be interested to see what the median is—could be a handful of users skewing the average.) This says a lot more about AppsFire users than it does about iPhone users in general.
As the presentation says, ‘mind the bias’—it’s a doozy.
I don’t consider myself a big app user by any means on my iPod Touch, but I have 71 apps in iTunes; a number which obviously doesn’t include apps I’ve deleted (can’t remember if there are any, maybe one or two), and all that in only 8 months. Random late-night/impulse downloads add up quickly.
Congratulations, you can now consider yourself a big app user. I’ve got about a dozen, after a year and a half of ownership. My girlfriend has none on her Touch. The guys at InStat (a market research company) say the average is below 5 for all smartphones, including the iPhone. They may be wrong, but I bet they’re not a factor-of-ten wrong.
Do they mean the average for the iPhone is less than five, or that the average for all smartphones (incl the data for iPhone) is less than five?
The latter would be very easy to believe due to lack of apps and the pain of actually getting them for the vast majority of smartphones out there.
Anyway in a small sample of people I asked on Mahalo, the average was about 50, with quite a big range.
I’m not sure, but given that the iPhone is a sizable chunk of the smartphone market, it can’t be too far off.
Regarding your informal Mahalo survey, keep in mind:
- Mahalo users == power users (nobody else has ever heard of Mahalo)
- small sample == big uncertainty
- wide range == big variation, use median rather than average
Avoiding these statistical pitfalls is what we pay market research companies for. We all live in an information bubble of our own creation, and it’s hard to break out of that bubble to get unbiased data.
Seems about right, though the App Store is already training people to expect low prices for apps. At some point, Apple needs to create a special section called “premium apps” which will make it easier to develop more elaborate apps (and charge accordingly).
It would also help if the “top 25″ paid apps were ranked in terms of sales revenue, not units downloaded.
Hi Brendan,
Totally agree with you!
If you’re a user of our Appsfire iPhone app (http://appsfire.com/+1), you’ll be able to discover the “top grossing apps” listing (computed real-time, again from our users!).
We published an article recently on this: http://blog.app...sed-on-top-reve
Best,
Yann.
I was going to point out the obvious case of selection bias… but the study instantly lost its credibility when they can’t even spell “bias” correctly.
Last week I did read http://infoworl...-party-over-317 “Google Android: The party is over” and although I dunno about who the author talks too calling the Pre the hottest thing it made me think.
Because of the great success stories of the some Iphone apps developers seem to be getting spoiled. How realistic is it anyway that software developed in just a few month’s like many apps are make huge amounts of money.
i’m on the opposite end.. have only bought one, and rest are free (all 4 of them)
I’m the exact same – downloaded about 5 or 6 apps and paid for one… have played that one that I bought for about 10 hours though so got my moneys worth!
I have around 30 apps and all of them are free. If I am able to get more than a dial up connection speed on my iphone, I would probably buy a few of them.
I suggest you check out our complementary conclusions and notes on the methodology here before anyone gets a heart attack
http://blog.app...n-iphone-owners
Ouriel Ohayon
AppsFire.com
i have an iphone and have spent over at least USD$150. My iphone is my computer and i like to experiment with various applications. Applications cost so little – it just means that i don’t eat chocolate!!
Interesting. I’d have to go through my purchases to figure out how much I spent, but, I’m going to guess that it’s around $80 if not more.
By the way, Daniel typo in the first sentence – iPhone Touch should be iPod Touch.
Thanks for the heads up, Jeff. Just got carried away with all the iPhone madness
I have had my iPhone 3G for little under a year now. To date, I’ve spent $3 on apps. I must be an outlier. And a cheapskate.
techcrunch readers are not representative population.
Nor are AppsFire users.
$80? I suppose I’m an outlier then; I’ve purchased exactly three apps. Two of those are games from the app store from authors I wanted to throw a few dollars at for the hours of entertainment I’ve received from their games.
The third app was Adblock.
Total cost to me was under $10, and I have very little interest in spending more. It’s hard to justify additional expenditures when I’m considering dumping the platform entirely for something Android-based.
This seems like an extremely irresponsible use of data. The selection “biais” is highly understated. Look at it another way:
You run a site that provides an easy way for book lovers to send books back and forth to one another. You can’t take that data and extrapolate it out to the entire domain of book lovers (or worse, anyone who owns a single book). Furthermore, the service itself encourages higher use of Apps; as such, the bias is made even more extreme.
In short, no freaking way these data are even close to representative of the general iphone user base.
The extrapolation figure we used was from adMob; and they use a discount rate for the total user base. But we admin there is a bias; call it early adopter, or fan boy bias…
But the data we have is real for the Appsfire users for sure! It’s a direct sample from their iPhone. We’ll provide more depth in the next updates. The ‘average’ is sometimes misleading indeed. Lots of users are spread in the long tail, while a few users actually spent several hundred and even several thousand dollars on apps!!!
This is the Appsfire 2 cents, for what it’s worth!
Here comes math genius again. $80 spent, $1.56 per application gives us ~ 50 paid application per user out of 65 installed. Hmm sounds like a BS. Again.
$1.56 is the average price per commercial app. That doesn’t mean users buy that particular distribution curve!
Do you know the average price of what they do buy? Since you had the data on which apps they had?
I’d expect the big sellers to be the highly polished games that cost more like $5.
Hi Philip,
Good point indeed. I’ll look into it…
Yann.
I’ve spent well over $80. I have over 150 apps in iTunes (only 36 synced to my phone).
60% of those $.99
25% were $2.99
15% were over $2.99 (one was $12.99)
I think I have a problem.
Here’s a screenshot of my installed apps.
http://www.flic...son/3874592673/
iPhone Rehab?
I’d like to see the demographic they tested with. Were they the age group of 18-25, 26-35 or higher? Would be interesting to see which demographic is supporting paid applications moreso than the others.
Most of my apps are either free or $.99. I think total, I’ve spent a little more than $30 (games and misc)
Appsfire for what? info is great, but you can get it from apple too.
… or from http://uquery.com … is there an app for that?? for what??
I used to spend money on many trial things like magazines, newspapers, silly books, But with iPhone at hand I now go to iTune store and buy what I need, and when I need it. And if something is priced between $0.99-2.99 even for a day of fun in my opinion it’s worth the cost.
Just very bias numbers. $80 is not the average of what iPhone users spent for their apps, it’s the average for the 1200 sample AppsFire users.
AppsFire is a site for people who like to tell others about their favorite iPhone apps, therefore you can assume that these users have more apps and spend more money on apps than the average iPhone owner.
Not all iphone users have installed the appsfire application. In fact, according to wikipedia 21.17 million units had been sold as of Q2 2009. Why did Appsfire survey use only 1,200 users’ data? Because they were lazy enough not to process 21,17 million records? Me doesn’t think so. Me thinks they only had about 1,2k users’ data. Which leads me to the next point: What kind of users install appsfire? Does that really represent “the average” iphone user? I’m highly skeptical.
Useful data. No question about it. But it shouldn’t be confused with “The average iphone user spends $80 on apps”.
Agreed.
It’s more like “The average AppsFire user spends $80 on apps”.
i spent morethen that on my iphone apps
I spend on coffee more than $100 per month. So what? Does it mean that coffee industry is larger than oil industry?
I did a very small survey of people on Mahalo, and we had an average of 50 or so apps, but only 6.5 of them were paid ones.
That said some of the highly polished apps like EA games are probably very big sellers, and push the average price of apps that are actually sold much higher than the average of all those in the store.
So maybe an average spend per person of $20?
I agree the sample here is highly skewed by how the data was gotten.
Its’ a big amount.
As others have stated, you obviously cannot extrapolate data about Appsfire users across all iPhone/iTouch users.
For starters, you’re missing people who have installed zero apps which is likely the majority. And make sure not to double-count updates.
I’d guess the averages across *ALL* iPhone/iTouch users are closer to 10 and $10.
The amount is just too high. I am not confident about the sampling. We can all make a conclusion based on a set of data, but how accurate these numbers are is another question. Also the numbers could be a bit skewed with all the $80-$100 GPS apps that have been released to the market recently. There have got to be a few outliers that are bringing up the average.
crappy confidence in these numbers based on the total populate size – they need a REAL sample…don’t believe me? run it yourself: 1200 against the 8M plus owners??? http://www.surv...stem.com/sscalc
I’ve probably spent more. Being able to buy and play deep, high-quality games anywhere for almost no money is addictive. I’ve been a pretty light gamer since I graduated from high school, but the quality and price of iPhone games has been habit forming…
Either pay $80 or join http://www.appgiveaway.com and get the apps free
I wonder what’s the most someone has spent so far?
I’ve spent at least 200$ dollars or more on apps.
Now that I have less money and a jailbroken iPod, I spend much much less.
These guys need to read up on random sampling.
Users of appfire do not constitute a random sample of iphone owners.
Interesting. I believe it’s $80. I’ve only had it for a week and have spent $20.
You should also check out http://www.appboy.com. Appboy is a social networking site that just launched for app developers and app users. Developers can use the site to promote their apps and have their own personal appstore url. Users and developers can comment and rate apps and share ideas for new ones. It’s easy to use and currently includes iPhone, Android & Blackberry Apps. See some great reviews of Appboy here: http://bit.ly/dqebg and http://bit.ly/10ct7D.
Joel Klassen
The Appboy Team
http://www.appboy.com
twitter.com/appboy
Do you know that actually anyone can easily create an iPhone apps and make money? In fact, a 9 year old boy from Singapore just did that and has sold over 4,000 downloads of his “Doodle Kids” game.
# Develop an app that is focused, practical, and small in size. The smaller the app file, the faster it will run and the more enticing it is to potential buyers. If the app is too big, buyers might not have room for it on their iPhone, causing fewer people to buy it, and you might not make as much money with your iPhone app.
Avoid letting extra features sneak into your app. If they are important, save them, and after the initial release of your app, release a premium version with the extra features. This will allow you to sell the simpler release (for those who need a smaller app), but also have a more extensive app that you can charge more for.
Keep it small, keep it simple, and create an app that people can use over and over again.