App Store

Apple has been releasing data about payments to developers with increasing frequency. Last week's $5 billion announcement was the fifth such update and came after about one quarter since the last.

Knowing the payments to developers and the cumulative download count allows us to get a very accurate revenue point for each download. As the frequency increases we can observe growth and seasonality patterns.

The following chart shows how average revenue per app download and the average payment rate to developers has changed since the iTunes app store opened and given the data points available:

The green area in the chart should add up to $5 billion. The average revenue for all downloads is 24c. 

Although there has been a drop in the revenue and payout rate in the last six months, the cause may be due to seasonal effects. We have not been able to see data that might show seasonality in prior years so we can't be sure it exists. However, it makes sense to me that new buyers are likely to engage in a burst of app buying and there are more iPhone purchases in the second half of the year than in the first.

In any case, the current "run rate" of payments to developers is about $7.5 million per day or $230 million per month. Both are up from last year.

Whether revenues are decreasing or not will require some more data. The last period's 20c is not far below the app store lifetime pricing of 24c.

 

Guessing the next Apple product has become the parlor game of choice for a whole generation of technology journalists and analysts. The premise of the game is that given a track record of breakthrough products, there is always another one just around the corner. Being the one to predict this next breakthrough product creates credibility and demonstrates the domain knowledge of the predictor. If the prediction fails to materialize there is consolation in dismissing the actual announced product as disappointing, unsophisticated or, worst of all, uninteresting.

Most often, these guesses are as much a reflection of the analyst as they are an analysis of the company. Too many predictions are designed to impress or demonstrate the imagination or knowledge of the predictor. They typically anticipate a giant leap of functionality, power or market re-structuring. They envision revolution not evolution; a cutting of the Gordian knot not a polishing of ugly rocks.

Yet nearly all of Apple's launches have been sustaining improvements in existing products, technologies or platforms. To name just a few:

• The iPad is an evolution of the iPod touch
• The iPod touch is an evolution of the iPhone
• The iPhone uses OS X and Objective C from the Mac
• OS X came from NeXT
• The app store market model came out of the iTunes store
• The iTunes store came from iTunes which came first to the Mac as a media sync tool for the iPod
• etc.

John Gruber explained the process last spring as it relates to many of Apple's launches. Although the iPhone did introduce a new user input method and experience that takes consumption in a new direction, its building blocks were there for all to see for many years. The iPhone is a natural evolution of the computer with a handy little "Phone" app.

Likewise, the iPod came seemingly out of nowhere but by watching the original launch you see it as part of a "media hub" strategy that envisions the Mac as a personal server. The very products which ended up disrupting the Mac/PC began as extensions of their victims.

You can trace the DNA of almost all of Apple's products to previous products. If Apple did not have these foundations, the slow-motion revolutions would not have happened. Rather than a deliberate big bang, Apple's disruptions are the result of a discovery process. A test, iterate and improve loop. This is why they seem obvious after the launch but also why they seem to be such an anti-climax.

Therefore, the challenge of predicting Apple's next product should be tackled not only through an act of imagination but by carefully projecting the current products and understanding where they can evolve.

So it is that I approach the question of Apple's TV disruption. My working assumption about the next Apple TV is that it already exists. It's none other than the existing Apple TV, improved.

Here are the clues or hints I noted:

• It uses iOS and the hardware from the devices that run it. It originally ran a PC architecture and shared a kernel with Macs.
• It has been integrated with iTunes media stores (with the notable exception of the iTunes app store)
• It has begun to introduce channels other than downloads (ESPN, Wall Street Journal) thus establishing its own distribution for traditional content
• It is a global product, depending only on the Internet protocols and independent of the balkanized cable standards
• Through AirPlay it is integrated with Macs and Apple devices.
• Through display mirroring, iOS devices can use the TV as an external monitor and can even change their own behavior when doing so

This last point is intriguing. I have not seen discussion of this feature, but if using an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S with iOS 5 and an Apple TV with the latest software updates it's possible to have an iOS device become a controller for TV-based game experiences. Developers are already using the API. When using a pinball game with screen mirroring, the device becomes a controller while the action takes place on the big screen. Switching display mirroring off bring the action and control back onto the small screen. There are still problems with lag and the processors are over-taxed on high frame rates, but the APIs are already there for developers. (I could also mention the potential of new a Bluetooth standard for better wireless response).

What these signals point to is Apple defining the TV as an iOS portfolio product. This means integration with iTunes, including an app store. This, in turn, means unleashing developer/creative talent through new monetization opportunities. This means new user experiences in discovery. This means FaceTime-like communication through the TV. This means many other things but mostly it means that the TV will be a platform product.

The only challenge is a (currently lacking) smooth interface. Perhaps that's where voice comes into the picture. But whether that is built-in at the next rev of the product or not is not the story. The story is going to be the sustaining improvement in the original Apple TV. A wonderfully asymmetric product begging to be ignored. A product that because of its apparent lack of success, effectively hides all its secrets in plain sight.

It was only a few weeks ago (at WWDC) that we had an update on the app store growth rates. The data was presented here.

One of the data points from the event was that iTunes hit 15 billion song downloads. Last week we heard that iTunes also hit 15 billion app downloads.

The milestones were reached within less than a month so it's a fairly safe assumption that apps have overtaken songs. I had originally guessed that the cross-over would take place at 13 billion at the end of 2010.

The actual performance is shown below (total downloads indexed to same starting date):

The 15 billion app threshold was passed within exactly three years while the 15 billion song threshold was passed in six years and 10 months. Shown on the actual time scale, the chart looks as follows:

Download rates for songs had a minor rebound in the last six months.

The app download rate is now at least 31 million per day while the song download rate is about 12 million per month. Including books (but excluding video content), the App Store in now delivering at least 44 million new content downloads per month.

My prediction of cross-over was off by seven months. This was due to three factors:

1. Song downloads increased unexpectedly. There was a rebound in the last six months where daily downloads went from about 8m/day to about 12m/day which is a new high. I had expected download rates to have peaked mid 2010.
2. App download rates proved to be more volatile than expected. As the last chart above shows, the download rates fluctuate quite a bit. The 4-period trend line is a bit more stable, but there are kinks.
3. Polynomial curve fitting is always sensitive.

When dealing with polynomial growth, predictions can be very dangerous. Nevertheless, I think the overall performance of the App Store is phenomenal.

 

According to 148apps.biz, the App Store has seen over half a million apps since inception. The number of available apps, according to Apple, is now 425k. (148apps claims 402k apps available in the US store.) The history of the App store catalog is shown in the following chart (showing both US and World-wide measures).

In an interesting new post by Appsfire, APPtrition - or why app store size does not matter that much... Ouriel Ohayon makes a good point: available is very different than accepted. When comparing catalogs it's important to distinguish between these measures. Apps are published and then unpublished for various reasons. He calls this app attrition and details the reasons it might happen.

What makes this interesting is the contrast between attrition rates on Android's Market and those on Apple's App Store. About 80k (or 16%) of Apple's catalog has been removed while nearly a third of Android apps have disappeared from the catalog. (By another measure, the submission total is tracked here and shows nearly 375k apps while Ouriel points out that there are 206k available. An apparent attrition rate of 45%.)

We can compare how the two marketplaces are adding apps here:

(The iTunes data is US only)

This data would indicate that the iTunes App Store has plateaued at about 20k apps per month while Android is still growing and adding at about 30k per month. The challenge for an observer is to reconcile the growth in Android submissions with the apparently far higher attrition rate.

In other words, Android developers and producers seem to be more prolific but less persistent.  With few if any constraints on submission it's understandable that there will be more apps thrown into the catalog. But why would they be so rapidly removed remains a mystery. Maybe economics, maybe policing, maybe something else altogether explains this.

The announcement of $2 billion total for App store payments to developers did not come as a surprise. On January 22nd Apple reached 10 billion total apps downloaded. From that figure and an earlier derivation of the average selling price, I estimated $2 billion was paid out around the same time frame.

We don't know exactly how many apps have been sold at exactly the moment when $2 billion was paid out so we don't have the means to update the ASP of apps (currently estimated at 29c).

We do know for certain however that the app store generated $2.86 billion in sales if $2 billion was paid out.

The new data affirms existing estimates.

There are now well over 390,366 apps in the app store[1]

via 10,000 Apps! - Presented by 148Apps.com :: 10,000 iPhone and iPod Touch applications in the iTunes App Store.

Since launch, December has been the month with the most apps added. In December 2008 3,800 apps were added, in 2009 25,517 and in 2010 it looks like we might get nearly 30k new apps.

That amounts to nearly 1000 new apps per day.

It also seems that 500k apps will have arrived by mid-2011. As the production of apps continues to grow one wonders if this new medium will turn out to become more popular than recorded music in terms of creative output.

[1] That includes about 65,000 inactive apps.

iOS has nearly three times more games than the previous twenty-five years of gaming combined.

via The staggering size of iOS's game collection.

Most of the comments in the linked article complain that there is no filter for "quality" in the App Store. Contrasts nicely with the persistent criticism that Apple curates the App Store.

From Distimo (registration required):

• The number of applications in the Apple App Store has grown from just under 200,000 in April 2010 to over 300,000 in October 2010.
• The proportion of iPad only applications outgrew the proportion of universal applications during the second quarter of 2010.This trend reversed in July 2010 with the proportion of iPad and universal applications in November being equal (7%).
• The average price for an application in the Apple App Store for iPad increased from $4.34 in April 2010 to $4.97 in October 2010 (+14.5%). During the same period, the average price of an application in the Apple App Store for iPhone increased only slightly from $3.94 to $4.03 (+2.3%).
• The average price of the top 100 paid applications in October 2010 is 171% higher in the Apple App Store for iPad than in the Apple App Store for iPhone; $5.80 compared with $2.14, respectively.
• The lower average price of applications in the Apple App Store for iPhone is due to the fact that a large portion of paid applications are priced at $0.99 (45%), while only 24% of applications are priced at this price-point on the iPad.
• Angry Birds was the top paid application in both the Apple App Store for iPhone and Palm App Catalog in September 2010. Angry Birds HD was the number three paid application in the Apple App Store for iPad.

After the last earnings report, many noted that Apple's gross margins dipped. Turley Muller noted in a letter to PED that the cause was probably the aggressive ramp in iPhone 4 production which broke new records at 14.1 million units.

That may be. My estimate of iPhone margin shows it dropping to about 49% from the more usual 55% (sometimes even higher).  We'll never know exactly how much, but sometimes margins drop. RIM and Nokia are punished for drops in the GM percent so why shouldn't Apple?

However, there are some other factors to consider: the overall margin is currently historically very high. As the high-margin iPhone makes up more of the total product mix, the overall margin should be growing. And it is. The chart below shows the trend since 2005. GM was in the high 20's five years ago.

Note however the other margin: operating margin. After taking the fixed costs into consideration (which we saw to be shrinking as a percent of sales), Apple's bottom line profitability has been rising slightly more rapidly than the GM. It has plateaued recently but not dipped significantly.

Also note that there have been dips in the past from which GM expansion resumed. One such dip was at the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, though we can't be sure that was attributed to the iPhone itself or to other factors like that most cited by management: components costs.

However, the bottom line profitability is only part of the picture. It would be instructive to look at which product contribute how much. You won't see this analysis often because the gross margin by product is not published by Apple and it takes quite a bit of guesswork to get there.

I maintain product-level gross margins and compute the overall GM bottom-up. The product-by-product line profitability is based on several assumptions which I won't detail here, but those assumptions lead to the following contribution chart:

There are several takeaways here:

1. The iPhone is huge (57% of gross profits). It is far more important than most people assume. Without it, the company would not have materially grown EPS since 2007.
2. The "Music" which includes iTunes revenues is tiny. Many people assume that iTunes is a large contributor to Apple's operating profitability but operating margins on the store are 10 percent. Peripherals add more to the bottom line than the iTMS/App Store. The benefit of the iTunes/App Stores is in the hardware sold.
3. Software contributes more now than the iPod. This is completely under everyone's radar but Apple's software business has been growing and with 80% gross margins (assumed) it's a big part of the profit picture.
4. The iPad margins are lower than the iPhone. As it grows in volume, the profit share will grow, but it's a long way from being the profit share leader.

This picture should also be a warning to Apple's competitors. If they seek to grow shareholder value and shift profits away from Apple they need to see just how much of that profit is captured in hardware. At the same time, they need to realize that it's the non-hardware businesses which make the hardware so desirable. Like it's products, Apple's income statement is very inter-dependent.

What is it that makes the iTunes App Store so compelling? Will the value the App store added to the iPhone be added by the Mac App Store to the Mac?

Here are the characteristics I think make the App Stores valuable:

1. They redefine software as content. The pricing, marketing, discovery and buying process is identical to that for content like music or video.
2. They redefine the skill required to create a relationship with customers. They allow a new class of less-skilled and less-capitalized developers participate in selling software directly to the buyer. By "skill" I don't mean engineering skill but marketing skill. A developer can create a product that can reach millions without having to acquire with channels and distribution skills.
3. From a consumer's point of view, they simplify purchasing and lower the price of software.

These three characteristics of app stores make them disruptive. The disrupted companies are the traditional software publishers. The response from game publishers to the App store were predictable: they condemned it for destroying value, "cheapening" their product, and creating a race to the bottom. They also predicted that it would all end badly as nobody would make any money.

The truth is that they were disrupted by different cost structures. The entrants did not need to spend on market development, and focused on innovating on the essential novelty of the user interface.

So the Mac App Store could be disruptive to traditional software vendors. A large new population of software developers could emerge targeting the Cocoa environment and they may bring new apps that move the jobs that the computer is hired for to appeal to new users.

However there is a problem. The Mac is a small target market relative to iOS. Apple announced that there are 50 million Mac users. This compares badly to the 130 million (or so) iOS users. It won't be long before 50 million iOS users will be added every three months.

So the first thing that Apple needs to do is grow the Mac installed base. Perhaps the new Air and following updated to the MacBooks will do just that. But the growth rate needs to be an order of magnitude faster. And I suspect price is an obstacle to this growth.

Regardless of this obstacle, the Mac App Store has the potential to change the appeal of the Mac. As the first personal computer with an App Store, new uses may emerge and create the same app-platform effect.

Yep, Amazon Launching Their Own App Store For Android Too.

No surprises here. Amazon, a retailer, is building a retail experience for apps. They are taking Android and throwing away Google's app store and a few other things as well and making their own tablet while at it.

Maybe they'll put Bing on it and Facebook too.