Distimo just released their latest report for August, which details sales of all the current mobile application stores. Here are the noteworthy results so far:
While the average price of all applications is only 16% higher in the Apple App Store for iPad than in the Apple App Store for iPhone, the average price of the 100 most popular applications is nearly three times as high in the Apple App Store for iPad.
Clearly people are willing to way for good quality apps on the iPad. The problem with the iPad appstore presently is that many of the apps are just supersized iPhone applications made to fit the bigger resolution, without really adding any functionality. But slowly this is changing – just look at the newly released Twitter for iPad, which makes good use of the large touch panel and gives as an idea of where iPad apps are moving towards in terms of user interaction and design conventions:
In the Apple App Store for iPad, BlackBerry App World and Windows Marketplace for Mobile, the respective companies that run each application store, (Apple, Research In Motion and Microsoft) are the top publishers in their own store with only a limited number of applications. Clickgamer.com and Offscreen publish many popular games in the Apple App Store for iPhone and Nokia Ovi Store making them the top publishers in these stores.
People expect higher quality apps from the vendors who design the software, and in most cases this does show. Apple‘s Pages is a prime example of this – while not super functional, the interface and ease of use is way ahead of any other similiar offering from other vendors.
Average prices of the different appstores also bring up some interesting results:
Google Marketplace has the lowest pricing, and the store size is rapidly increasing. Also worth noting is Blackberry‘s cost which is still quite high, but this can be ascribed to their minimum price being $2.99, but this is being changed with the latest release of App World. So expect those prices to drop soon enough. The iPad is still being seen by developers as a higher income “niche” product, so the current prices still reflect this.
Here is some other results from the different appstores:
If you want to read the Distimo report more in-depth, you can find it here.
