Apple today announced that the iTunes App Store now features over 100,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. App Store users have downloaded over 2 billion applications. While Apple is obviously celebrating this as a success of its developer program, AppsFire reminds us that only a very small number of these apps are hits. According to AppsFire, the majority of apps sits in the App Store’s long tail, where 80% of the apps barely see any active installs.
According to AppsFire’s data, only a small number of apps are installed on over 50% of iPhones and iPods. These are the usual suspects like the Facebook app or Shazam. The long tail, however, is very long. AppsFire’s data shows that only 20,000 of the apps in the store are actually being used. The #1000 app was installed on less than 2% of all phones and iPods and there are still 99,000 apps with fewer active installs in the store.
While Apple uses games from Electronic Arts and the I Am T-Pain app as examples of highly popular applications, these apps also profited from instant name recognition and a built-in fan base. For other apps, getting discovered in the Apps Store is getting increasingly hard as the competition heats up. Besides bringing a rather lackluster version of the genius feature to the App Store, Apple also hasn’t made any significant improvements to the app discovery experience in iTunes and the mobile store.
