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Every brand will have an app: cool research on Luxury Brands and iPhone apps

We're tracking closely the subject but this research brings a new outlook worth sharing

Facebook vs Twitter on the iPhone: Compete says something different. Why?

Compete lead a research about how users use their smartphone. There is some interesting data in that report. Some of which we questioned (if this is the same report). 

Another piece of information that stands out is that about 70% of users use Facebook from their iPhone, which is pretty comparable to our own research (to be precise % of iPhone owners who have installed the iPhone app). 

Facebook is hot among iPhone owners: 71% of iPhone users report accessing Facebook from their mobile device, 37% listed Facebook as one of their top three most utilized apps and 18% claim it's their favorite app.

However Compete declares that only 26% only use Twitter from the iPhone. To be honest this is a little surprising and if the method is declarative i think it is worth digging a little deeper.

From our report 60+% have installed a Twitter app on their iPhone and from our declarative poll close to 65% (more than 1200 respondents) use Twitter from their iPhone (more than Facebook)

So what is it going to be? The answer has probably to do with the way the sample was built (Compete sample was made of 100+ respondents who own an iPhone). Our sample is probably biased by the nature and age of our service, but we believe the biais is not that strong (confirmed by the fact many of our stats match others reports built with serious methodology).

I'd love to hear more from Compete on that one.

Twitter wins big time in usage on Facebook from the iPhone

A little update on our research. We issued a poll to understand if you guys are using more twitter or facebook from the iPhone. So far a little more than 700 respondents have participated.

The result is crystal clear: iPhone owners use more Twitter than Facebook on Their iPhone: 69% are using either more Twitter or only Twitter.

This is of course a small sample (although 700 answers start to have some meaning). What would be really interesting, would be the actually aggregated data usage for both services provided by ATT (or any national operator in deal with Apple). They probably know a lot more... 

update 24/09/09: we passed the 1000 respondents. The trend is the same. One reader added a smart comment: since Twitter status can be synced with Facebook or some apps enable double publishing the Twitter usage and Facebook usage could be correlated but the prime access goes to Twitter

Check it: Some ★ important precisions ★ and complementary stats from our report

Given the heat our report has generated (btw Top presentation of day on SlideShare...), we thought it would be important, before some readers get a heart attack, to publish some complementary precisions and also unreleased data. This was our first shot. And first shots are what they are. First shots. So here are some important things to remember.


On the average amount spent per device

The data that was mostly discussed was the average spent per device: $80

Many readers/iPhone owners do not identify themselves with this number. Well, let's look closer..

This was calculated by dividing the cumulated value of all paid apps that we found on the device by the number of devices that we track. This gives a simple picture but does not help get the reality of the how different users spend really, and indeed, there is a bias from the Appsfire that we suppose is made of iPhone enthusiasts and power users. However, note that we do not track apps that have been uninstalled, so the bias is perhaps neutralized in some ways...

To be totally precise we should have published a distributed graph of value spent (how many have spent more than X and less than Y). We'll do that in our next edition. However digging deeper we found that one of the most "representative" value spent per device is $45, by trimming away the outliers and looking at median figures. Some users spend lot more and some lot less. 

On the average price of paid apps

The $1.56 average price per application that we mentioned was the average price across the 15k+ apps that we track; it should be noted that free apps were included. Again, simple average. To make the picture clearer, excluding free apps from this calculation yields an average price of $2.87 per 'paid' app.

By popular request, we dove into the data to find out the average prices spent on a per device basis (within our Appsfire dataset). And this is what we found: average price per application (all included) is $1.31 while average price per 'paid' app is $3.46.

Bottom line

Like we said in our previous post, this data will gain depth and meaningfulness over time especially as our user base grows. 

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For the record, here is the original report

How about some ★ real data ★ on iPhone owners?

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