What can a sampling of 100 applications and 8-million consumers on four platforms tell us about the smartphone application market?
The mobile analytics firm Flurry crunched the numbers; we’ll highlight the results:
Platform
There are three numbers that matter for smartphone application platforms: (1) number of developer on a platform, (2) number of applications for a platform, (3) the platform’s market-share.
A pair of observations:
1. Android developer- and application-numbers are disproportionally high compared to its market-share. Hypothesis: In a way, because of its openness, Android is the hacker’s (positive connotation) platform. This attracts developers. Unfortunately, the market-share number isn’t significant enough to move Apple to be less restrictive.
2. Blackberry app usage doesn’t commandeer a pixel-wide swath in the graph; I’ll be keeping this chart at the ready to dissuade prospective contract customers interested in supporting both iPhone and Blackberry.
Daily Application Category Usage
If you want to correlate usage and downloads, you could try to pair this data with the downloads survey-data from by Compete, reported here earlier.
The Games Segment
Flurry didn’t attempt a full market analysis on the game segment. Instead, they provided sales and lifecycle data on on a pair of paid puzzle games whose whose free/lite counterparts reached the #1 overall app ranking.
Downloads
Neither of the apps are $0.99 games: Game 1 sells for $2.99, Game 2 for $5.99. The former made over $450,000 in eight weeks; the latter topped $1,050,000 in eight weeks.
Finally, they provide some additional evidence to the common wisdom that a game’s lifetime is about three months:
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