app

The last four months have seen tremendous app growth. Apple grew by 59k apps while Android added nearly 10k and Nokia added 5.5k apps to Ovi.

As a percent, Palm grew the fastest with 1,352%, followed by Ovi with 827%. The slowest growing was actually Blackberry App World with a mere 56% growth.

More curious is the popularity of certain categories. Games and Books are dominant in the App Store, while Personalization and Music account for more than half of Ovi (ringtones and wallpapers?)

Finally, in terms of catalog ranking overall, Ovi climbed the league table to third spot behind Apple and Android and overtaking Blackberry App World. Palm overtook Windows Mobile Marketplace which is now dead last with 693 apps.

link: Distimo Mobile World Congress 2010 Presentation - Mobile Application Stores State of Play

Total Apps Approved: 180534

Total Available Apps: 161262

In related news: the total number of apps on the Android Market is now almost 30,000.

Sources: appshopper.com, androidlib.com

According to 148apps.biz there are 823 apps being submitted to the app store every day for the month of February. If it’s maintained this will be a new record, beating the 821 apps per day for last December.

This rate implies 300k apps per year run rate. Of course, the submission rate has been increasing steadily so it might not be long before we see 1000 apps per day.

Source: 148apps.biz.

Delivering precisely what the world needs today:

• Samsung launched Bada
• Microsoft launched Windows Phone “7 Series”
• Nokia and Intel jointly announced MeeGo.

Three new ambitious platforms starting with zero installed bases and no applications are going up against the following:

• Symbian with more than 200 million users and 20k apps
• WebOS with less than 3 million users and about 1k apps
• Windows Mobile with 30 million users and about 2k apps
• iPhone OS, about 75 million users and 150k apps
• Android with 3 to 5 million users and approx. 20k apps
• Blackberry OS with more than 50 million users and a few thousand apps.

It should be noted that Microsoft’s new Windows Phone “7 Series” will compete with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5 which will continue as a product line.

MeeGo will also compete with Nokia’s existing Symbian OS for developers, replacing Maemo.

Most of these new platforms will not have products shipping for at least 6 months during which time another 50 million (at least) new users will join existing ecosystems.

There are now nine smartphone platforms, but who’s counting? I’ve been hearing predictions of consolidation for years and although platforms have come and gone (PalmOS, SavaJe), the total number continues to increase.

If nothing else, this seems to indicate that the industry is not in any state of maturity or point of “over-service” where commoditization takes place.

Taking the data released so far on the iTunes App Store and performing to usual regression analysis gives us a high degree of confidence that 300k apps will be achieved by end of this year and 500k well before the end of next year.

The app add rate is running at about 500 apps per day.

The graphs above show the total catalog and the app addition rate as reported by Apple and as estimated by 148apps.com.

The other useful data is that 148apps.com has had a pretty good record in tracking the catalog.

Apple just started its countdown clock to 10 billion song downloads.

I combined the data available for iTunes downloads of Songs and Apps (from Wikipedia) in the graphs above.

Obviously, the App download rate is increasing (i.e apps are accelerating more rapidly) than songs. Both are averaging about 10 million units per day over the past 3 months.

A Download Totals graph also shows the acceleration plainly with the App Store getting to 3 Billion downloads in 19 months vs. 36 months for Songs. A curve-fitting analysis shows that the App store will reach 10 billion downloads 27 months after launch or around October 2010.

The same analysis shows that the App Store will overtake the Music Store in total units downloaded in December 2010 when they both reach around 13.5 billion downloads.

Jobs said that they have over 140k apps as of Jan 27th. The spider on 148apps.biz has been pretty accurate and it’s showing a bit over 150k apps as of today. Over 21k apps were added in January, with only December’s 25k apps beating it for the record.

The add rate was seen steadying around 10k/mo. during the latter half of last year, but I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that 20k/mo is the new norm. With the iPad coming on stream, I would not be surprised if Apple announces the 200k total sometime around May 1st.

On the app odometer, 100k will roll over every 5 months.

When asked about the company's recent acquisitions of Quattro and Lala after yesterday's earnings report, Apple's chief financial officer Peter Openheimer answered, "In terms of Quattro and Lala we acquired Quattro because we wanted to offer a seamless way for developers to make more money on their apps, especially free apps."

As I said before: why would a developer bother with AdMob if Apple integrates ads into the SDK? Does AdMob offer better terms? Does AdMob offer more sponsors? It's the developers (and Apple indirectly) who supply inventory.

From the VP of marketing for the Limo Foundation:

Growth within the siloed Apple ecosystem will actually stifle the grass-roots innovation

It's interesting that this comment came on the day after Rob Glaser left Real Networks. Let's take a stroll down memory lane of Glaser quotes:

(in 2003) “It’s absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 (percent) to 5 percent of the player market. … The history of the world is that hybridization yields better results.”

“Apple’s (market) share will go down if they continue to do this. The only way to presently put songs on an iPod is to (buy) them from iTunes.”

The (unforeseen) standard that emerged from the iPod is iTunes marketplace. It allowed Apple to establish itself as the premier and dominant merchant of all media including disruptive new media like apps. The iPod was "closed", "siloed" and "locked-in" users. But it worked and grew and grew to the point where it set the standard.

The same arguments raised against the iPhone were raised against the iPod and Windows before it. Last I checked iPod had 70% share 9 years after the launch and Windows has 90% share 20 years after launch. iTunes sells more songs than any other retailer on the planet and more apps that anyone imagined possible.

Perhaps this data bears repeating:

• 140,000 apps - made by over 28,000 developers
• Users downloaded an average of 3.7 apps each in December.
• One Quarter of apps downloaded are paid. Average cost of $2.59/app.
• Each iPhone user spends an average of $10/mo.
• There are over 75 (est.) million active users
• 200 million apps are being downloaded every month
• $500 million in revenues each month. 70% to developers or $385 million

All these numbers are increasing and accelerating. iPhone Platform Fastest Ecosystem Ramp in History.

Understanding the new world of apps. Apps are not Applications.

That should have been the first sign that the software market was changing. It’s obvious in retrospect; people were buying software that would make them laugh. This runs counter to the common understanding of an Application. An Application represents the developer’s best effort at creating software that applies the capabilities of the device to solving a specific problem. Making people laugh is not a problem an Application can solve; it’s not about the device it’s about the person using it.

Lots more clues here:

http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/67

I always said that the App is a new art form. As much art as desktop publishing and web design and home videos done by the masses. It's not pretty but it's real.

At least 22k apps were added in December. It looks like we're on track for Jobs to announce 150k apps by the time of the tablet announcement. By one count, 147k apps have already been published to the App store.

The last 50k apps will have taken 3 months. Download rate now is about 300 apps per second.

UPDATE: Jobs announced 140k apps on Jan 27.