How about some ★ real data ★ on iPhone owners?
update: read also those complementary results and precisions
Today we are releasing our first "State of the App Store" market insights, specifically about Apps and iPhone metrics many companies, journalists, developer and bloggers are curious to know.
And it has a unique approach compared to the many market research you have read here and there. Why? Because our research is actually based on the analysis of what is really installed in someone's iPhone/iPod. Ad Mob for example released a great piece of research based on a sample of 1000 iphone owners. But this research is based on declarative data. Flurry has also some great data but is related only to apps that have installed their analytics code and can't provide a full and accurate picture about what's exactly installed in a given device.
What we have done exactly?
We used a sample of 1200 appsfire users (meaning that we know precisely what each user has) and took anonymously (we insist on the privacy respect), a picture of what's exactly installed on each single iPhone. We then aggregated this data to produce a unique overview about what can be found "on average" in an iPhone.
You can view below the actual data and the conclusions (or here if you read in RSS)
While many debate about the actual size of the Paid App Market (remember it is different than the size of the iPhone app market), our preliminary research drives us to think that Admob is not far from being in the right range. It will be interesting to see over time how this evolves as our methodology sharpens and app prices change.
Some important reserves should be taken into account
- We are assuming that the price of each app has not changed since we do not know when each app has been installed and purchased. Since the average price of each app is decreasing over time, this means that our data is understating the reality
- Like for all research, the data gain meaning over time when it can be compared and analyzed consistently. This is only our first release, we ll issue more data soon that will be compared with that one
- Sample representativeness : this is an area that will get better over time. We need first to make a split between iPHone and iPod Touch users. Next releases will include that. In addition, we need to make sure the windows/mac ratio is more clearly addressed. We released our Windows version after our Mac version. A biais could appear there. It will disappear over time
- Over time we ll provide a better picture of this data per region and country, since its local App Store has its own catalog.
update: the news has been covered by TechCrunch
update 2: we made the home page of Digg. you can give us a vote if you wish
