Two recent analyses of the app store have come to light, both of which show interesting trends in development and use, which will doubtless be of great interest to developers.
Flurry analytics have released their monthly datagasm covering the world of smartphones. Firstly, they showed that users get bored of apps very quickly. User retention from both the iPhone and Android marketplaces was remarkably similar, with only around 40% of people sticking with an app over a month, which rapidly plummets to 10% after three months.
They also showed that the announcement of the iPad fired up a huge amount of developer interest, and they saw a massive jump in the number of projects started for the platform. This was the largest spike in their recorded history, and represented an almost three-fold increase in projects.
Distimo have had a look at the app store, and saw an increase of 10,000 apps since Jobs’ iPad event, and they now believe that there are 150,000 apps for download. In an announcement bound to raise the hopes of book readers eyeing up the iPad, books now make up the second biggest category of apps. Games still come out on top with 28,500 apps, but ebooks now clock in at 27,300 of which 92% are paid apps. That significantly beyond the iPhone average of 75%/25% paid to free. Obviously people are producing books for the iPhone, which will hopefully carry over to the iPad. The real question, is how many of those are just public domain books grabbed for free, thrown into a basic reader app, and then a $1 price tag added?
Written By 
And in addition to your article–how many of those 150,000 apps are Lite/Free versions of Full version apps? These should also be considered as duplicates and not counted.