On the fourth anniversary of the App Store, Distimo has released a report analyzing the overall trends that have been hitting this marketplace over the last few years. Looking over that report, it’s remarkable how big the App Store has grown, but also how much it has changed.
Distimo peg the number of apps available as 650,000, and have a number of key takeaways.
- As the number of apps grows, competition is fiercer. Due to this “the number of downloads among the top 200 most popular applications per available app in the Apple App Store for iPhone decreased from 15.4 at its height to 8.4 in June 2012.”
- The USA is still the largest market for iOS apps, but it’s slowly declining, and now only 26% of the free app downloads come from the USA.
- If you want to sell your app in the remaining 74% of the world, it’s all about localization.
- Paid downloads have only increased in sale by 13%, and have in fact decreased in price by 16%.
- When you look at the 100 highest grossing applications over the last two years, revenue has tripled, but that’s all due to in-app purchases. Now 68% of revenue comes from freemium titles.
- You can thank games for that.
It really does look like in-app purchases are the only way to make money in the App Store these days.
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