We noticed that many developers turn to Quora to validate mobile business plans, estimate market sizes or plan promotions more efficiently. At Distimo we gather a lot of data that is relevant to those developers. Therefore we decided to start tracking Quora and answer those questions for which we have data that we can share. This post is the second in the series and details what number of downloads an application needs to hit the top charts in the different categories in the United States.

This question has been asked frequently to us after our first contribution and there are quite a lot questions on Quora about this topic as well.

Naturally, the nature of applications defines the demand and consequently to reach the top in a popular category requires more downloads than in a less popular one. For example, games are a very popular genre of applications while demand for weather applications is more limited. Moreover, free applications tend to have much higher download volumes than paid applications as the threshold to download is lower.

This post shows the downloads required to hit the top 25 per category. We chose the top 25 because the first 25 applications are shown immediately when a user fires up the app store on their mobile. All data is based on daily download figures in the Apple App Store for iPhone in the United States in April 2012.

To hit the top 25 most popular free application in the Entertainment category, an application would need to have 6.7 thousand daily downloads, while an equal position in the weather category only requires 300 downloads. Although the Top Overall contains only applications that are also available in other categories, it is still added to give a complete picture.

On average, across all categories, the volume needed to hit the top 25 most popular free applications is 13 times higher than the volume needed to hit the top 25 most popular paid applications. However, there are large differences per category. For example, in the weather (9x) and education (9x) categories consumers seem more willing to pay for applications. The volumes required to hit the top 25 most popular paid applications are given below.

As is clear from the graphs, Games is the most popular category. Therefore we did the analysis again for subcategories of games.

If you would like to have more insights in your own and your competitors rankings across the world and analyze your app downloads and ad revenue, take Distimo Monitor for a spin! Distimo Monitor supports all major app stores and ad networks and provides detailed analytics including downloads, revenue, rankings and reviews.

This was our second post in this series. Please let us know (@distimo / @gert_jan) if there are other interesting (unanswered) questions on Quora that could be answered with our data.

Last Friday, Distimo was pleased to be speaking at the Festival Of Games in Utrecht. At this event, we gave a presentation titled: “The Appstore Opportunity” . The presentation was aimed at Games developers and covers trends in monetization, changing impact of countries and stores. Moreover, more information about the top rankings is given and finally our new product, app link was demonstrated.

It is our pleasure to release our latest Distimo Publication.

The recent one billion dollar acquisition of Instagram by Facebook signals a significant milestone in the app store landscape, and this month’s publication focuses on the riseof Instagram. This month, we also cooperated with Skylines to analyze how app usage compares to the number of downloads. Please have a look at our Pinterest board as we uploaded all our graphs on our board to enable sharing of charts.

The key findings from this report are:

• Instagram is an impressive success story. During the first month after its release, daily downloads in the US were under 10,000, however, in April 2012, daily downloads have been over 100,000 for several days.

• Looking at the growth of Instagram since May 2011, the cumulative downloads increased sevenfold in the US up to and including March 2012. The number of shares from Instagram to Twitter however, increased twelvefold indicating that the number of shares per user are increasing.

• Instagram is not equally successful in every country. It took Instagram only one day to reach the top spot in the Photography category for the iPhone in the US, however it took almost two months in China and over half a year in Korea. In these countries, users prefer apps similar to Instagram, but with the possibility of sharing to their local networks like Sina, QQ Space, me2day.

• Instagram reached the top ten overall in Germany, UK and US after 350 days for the first time. This milestone coincided with the exact moment Instagram announced they had reached 10 million users. In terms of usage, this was the first day more than 200,000 pictures were posted on Twitter on one day via Instagram: 14 percent more than that same day a week prior.

• When Instagram was launched on Android, it reached the number one spot in the social category in five of the ten most important countries: the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Italy. In the US, this happened within four days. In Australia, Canada, the UK, and Italy, Instagram became the number one social app in under 10 days. The fact that Instagram is published in the Social category instead of the Photography category makes clear that Instagram no  longer considers itself as simply a photography app.

• More and more apps integrating some kind of Instagram functionality are added every day. Some of the most popular iPhone apps include Camera Awesome and Pic Stitch.

You can now download this publication.

The press kit including all image files is also available.

Aside from this free publication, our paid featured reports are available for purchase for North America, Europe and Asia as well.

Today, we are pleased to announce our partnership with CCS Insight. Together, we are a launching a new product, App VU Global:

App VU Global combines extensive data with incisive analysis of the performance of software stores and the global apps market. This unique product identifies important trends and makes detailed comparisons across all major app stores, highlighting trends in consumer adoption and buying behavior.

The product comprises quarterly face-to-face presentations and supporting data in Excel format. Presentations provide specific implications and recommendations, and the service is complemented by bundled enquiry time with CCS Insight analysts and factual, transactional app market data supplied by Distimo.

We believe our app market data in combination with CCS Insight’s experience with analysing global industry trends and excellent team of analysts, provides a unique product in the market that can help many organizations define and steer their content strategy.

Now, for the first time, a comprehensive understanding of which apps are succeeding in which sectors and in which parts of the world — and why — is available to any company wanting to capitalise on this rapidly evolving market.
(Paolo Pescatore, Director of Operator Strategy, Applications and Content at CCS Insight)

Get in touch
If you are interested to learn more about App VU Global, please get in touch. The full press release is also available.

About CCS Insight
CCS Insight is a global telecommunications analyst company. It provides comprehensive services that are tailored to meet the needs of individual clients, helping them make sense of the connected world.

It is our pleasure to release our latest Distimo Publication.

This report offers an extensive analysis of the Apple App Store for iPad. It dives into the general characteristics of the app store and aims to give developers better insights to base their strategy upon. Please have a look at our Pinterest board as we uploaded all our graphs on our board to enable sharing of charts.

The key findings from this report are:

• iPad users are willing to pay for premium content offered by newspapers and magazines in the Newsstand category. The category launched only six months ago, however more than 70k USD per day is already being made by the top 100 grossing Newsstand applications in the United States.
• The United States has been eclipsed by China as the largest market for free applications in the world for the first time in the history of the Apple App Store for iPad. During February 2012, the number of daily downloads in the top 300 most popular free applications in China exceeded 1.1M, while the volume among the top 300 most popular free applications on each day in the United States was just below 1M.
  

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• Free Weather, Newsstand and Entertainment are the most attractive categories in terms of downloads per applications. In the chart below the volumes in the top 100 free applications divided by the number of available free applications is given per category.
  

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You can now download this publication.

The press kit including all image files is also available.

Aside from this free publication, our paid featured report covering February 2012 is available for purchase for North America, Europe and Asia now as well.

It is our pleasure to release our latest Distimo Publication.

This report offers an extensive analysis about two important stores for the Android platform: the Google Android Market and the Amazon Appstore. This report dives into the number of apps and the growth in available applications in the store. We also analyze differences in pricing and monetization strategies. Moreover, a comparison is made between revenue generated by top apps that are available in both stores. All data covers the stores in January 2012 unless otherwise noted. Since the Amazon Appstore is only available in the United States, all figures, both for the Amazon Appstore and the Google Android Market cover the United States only.

The key findings from this report are:

You can now download this publication.

The press kit including all image files is also available.

Aside from this free publication, our paid featured report covering January 2012 is available for purchase for North America, Europe and Asia now as well.

It is our pleasure to release our latest Distimo Publication.

This report gives an overview of the effects when an application is featured in the Apple App Store for iPhone, Apple App Store for iPad and Google Android Market. Moreover, this report shows the effects that occur when applications are put on sale.  We conclude with data about the average prices of the highest grossing applications, and an overview of the types of applications that generate the most revenue. All data covers the Apple App Store for iPhone, Apple App Store for iPad and Google Android Market during the period October – December 2011 in the United States, unless otherwise noted.

The key findings from this report are:

• One of the ways publishers try to attract attention to an application is to put the app on sale. The average revenue rose by 41% in the Apple App Store for iPhone when looking at those applications that were already among the 100 highest grossing applications in any category, on the first day of the sale. Moreover, the revenue during the whole sale increased by 22%. In the Apple App Store for iPad those figures were +52% and +19%, respectively. In the Google Android Market on the first day the revenue increased by 7%, and during the whole sale increased by 29%.

• 30% to 50% of the applications on sale experienced a decrease in revenue even though on average the revenue increased in all three stores for the total group of applications on sale.  Our research found that it is important to offer a significant price reduction to actually earn more revenue when putting an application on sale. In general, we noticed that the optimum sales occurred when the price was cut in half or the application was offered in tier 1 ($0.99) or tier 2 ($1.99).

• Another way to attract attention is by getting featured in one of the app stores. When looking at those applications that were already ranked among the top 100 most popular applications, the average gain in the first three days after getting featured was highest in Google Android Market (+42 ranks), followed by Apple App Store for iPad (+27 ranks), and Apple App Store for iPhone (+15). Looking at the whole period these applications were featured (seven days), the rank gains were more or less equal to the three days average in both Apple stores, but were even higher in the Google Android Market (+65 ranks).

Looking To Assess These Effects Better?

Distimo Monitor provides benchmarks to assess your price better. With the pricing benchmark you can compare the price of your app with the prices of the 100 most popular/grossing applications in the category in which your app is published in all countries. Moreover, with Distimo Monitor you can track where you have been featured and see what the effect of being featured was on your downloads. Sign up for Distimo Monitor for free or take it for a spin.

Google Android Market gave itself a nice new year’s present last weekend. The total number of active applications worldwide in the Android Market reached the 400,000 milestone. Android Market has topped the 200K and 300K available apps milestones in April and August 2011 respectively.
The main contributors to reach this milestone are free applications. Roughly, 2/3 of the available applications are free in Android Market. The percentage of free applications has steadily grown month over month from 60% in April 2011 to 68% free content at the end of 2011. One of the reason behind this increase in free content is the success of the freemium business model, which is explained in more detail in our annual overview.

Google Android Market needed two more months in order to reach this landmark compared to the Apple App Store for iPhone, which hit the 400K available apps in June 2011. Interesting to see is that Android Market has taken 31 months to reach the 200,000 milestone, while Apple only needed 22 months to do this for iPhone apps. However, Android Market needed only four more months to pass the 300.000 milestone, while the App Store for iPhone needed eight more months after Apple hits the 200,000 milestone. Moreover, the gap between the 300K and 400K milestone is also smaller for the Android Market than for the Apple App Store for iPhone, 4 and 7 months respectively.

In addition, Google Android Market has nearly passed a second milestone as well. Android Market has almost more than 100K publishers active in its application store. In the Android Market, each developer publishes 4.1 applications on average, while  developers published nearly five apps on average a year ago.

The milestone  reached by Google Android Market relates to applications that are currently active in the store.  Many applications have been removed by Google or developers, due to infringement of copyright for example.

If you are a frequent visitor, you know that this blog is our standard outlet to report lastest findings on the apps market. We try to dig into our data and extract the most relevant trends at any given time, communicated either via our monthly publications or as blog posts.

Since we are a numbers company, we became curious what you readers have found the most interesting content of this year that was published here.

So here it goes, the top 10 most viewed posts and a short snippet of the highlighted market findings:

1. In-depth view on download volumes in the Google Android Market (May 2011)
The Android Market proved to be a challenging environment for developers to monetize using the one-off model. Until May 2011, 80% of all paid applications that were available at the time had been downloaded less than 100 times in the Google Android Market worldwide.

2. Quora answering series: download volume needed to hit the top charts (December 2011)
A very often heard question among developers; what do I need to do to get in the top X? Based on our understanding of the ranking algorithms and transactional data, we highlighted the download volume that you need in the top 10 largest countries, to get a certain ranking position.

3. The battle for the most content and the emerging tablet market (April 2011)
This year we have witnessed a fierce race among the leading app stores for the largest number of available apps. More apps mean more choice for the consumer, which is crucial in this now content-driven market.

4. App distribution becomes a global game: shift of power & impact for developers (June 2011)
The Western world is no longer dominating content consumption on smartphones. The app download volumes in Asian countries have shown a dramatic growth during the first half of the year, which later would continue to keep up in the rest of 2011.

5. Mobile gaming trends: popularity, pricing and monetization (July 2011)
Since the launch of the first app stores, games have driven a very substantial proportion of downloads. Games as a category have taken the lead in demonstrating the potential success of new possible monetization models such as in-app purchases and virtual currencies.

6. Full year 2011 publication (December 2011)
The obvious moment to look back on the most important trends of this year. In-app purchasing has driven a very large part of store revenues, where Google is demonstrating even a bigger uptake than Apple proportion wise. Asia demonstrates huge potential for developers, but in-store monetization still needs a lift.

7. Insights into Apple’s ecosystem: comparing Mac, iPad and iPhone (March 2011)
Apple was the first in the market to bring the app store model across its full device range, covering phone, tablet and the desktop. The Mac App Store demonstrated fast rise of revenue generation possibilities using mainly the one-off paid model.

8. What words (not) to use in your application name (May 2011)
Application names are important traffic drivers, since they affect the search results within app stores. This post provides an overview of the 25 most used words by developers and also highlights that many developers tried to ride on the Angry Birds wave by using these words in their application names.

9. Presentation from Mobile World Congress 2010: mobile app stores state of play (February 2010)
This is a special one for us, since it is one of the first presentations we gave back in early 2010 on market trends. It’s an interesting exercise to look back at these ‘old’ market findings and compare this with where we are today.

10. Presentation from Verizon Developer Conference: Pricing for success (September 2011)
This year we have seen major shifts in new monetization strategies that have become the key revenue driver for mobile content. Also channel fragmentation has brought the app store model beyond mobile, which brings a whole new set of opportunities as well as challenges in discovering what works and what does not for developers.

Going back through these market trends of this year emphasizes again how incredibly fast this market is changing. We absolutely can’t wait to discover what’s next together with developers, app store owners, carriers, and anyone that plays a role in mobile content.

Happy New Year!

Team Distimo