Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch has been growing quickly over the weekend. Close to 250 applications have been added since Friday. As Medialets reports, at the same time, the average price of those applications has dropped. Interestingly, free applications are getting higher average ratings from their users than paid apps.
Sales and Satisfaction
According to Apple’s press release, more than 10 million applications have been downloaded since the App Store went live. That is indeed an impressive number. Medialets has crunched some data on these apps and noticed a couple of interesting trends:
- the average price per paid app has fallen from $6.03 at launch on Friday to $5.47 on Sunday
- in general, reviewers on iTunes are rating free apps higher than paid apps
- free apps are rated 25% more often than paid apps
As more apps are added to the store, it makes sense that the average price would drop.
While there are no exact download numbers for the apps available from Apple, Medialets used the number of reviews as a proxy to estimate the number of downloads. Obviously, users are going to download more of the free apps than the paid apps, but if the number of reviews is any indication, the market for paid apps is also very active.
Mobile Gaming
Users are clearly thinking of the iPhone and iPod touch as a mobile gaming platform as well. Currently, except for MLB’s At Bat (iTunes link), all the top downloaded apps in the store are games.
This demonstrates that users are quite willing to pay for iPhone applications, as long as they are reasonably priced and easily available. Most of the games are priced between $4.99 and $9.99.
Crashes
While the arrival of native applications on the iPhone and iPod touch was looked forward to with great expectations, reality is slowly setting in and a lot of users and developers are reporting numerous crashes. Most of the time, applications are just crashing right back to the homescreen, but some crashes are taking down the complete operating system, forcing a reset of the phone.
As noted by TUAW, a lot of developers are blaming Apple for this. Judging from the fact that Apple’s own Remote application has crashed here quite a few times, it seems that developers rushing out their apps with bugs to beat the deadline isn’t the only reason for these problems.
Looking Ahead
While the App Store is still going through some growing pains, it is already clear that there is a huge demand for native apps and that users think of the iPhone as a platform and not just as a fancy mobile phone. Apple is currently facing two major problems: crashing applications and also some cheating among developers. Chances are that Apple is going to (hopefully) release a firmware update pretty soon that will fix the crashes (if they are indeed Apple’s fault) and will change the way it sorts applications to prevent some of the more blatant cheating by developers.
Overall, the store has been a major success already, now the question that remains is if it can keep this momentum going after the first wave of curious users has tried it out.
