iTunes App Store: The First Five Months

Taking a cue from Raven's recent post announcing the 10,000 iPhone app milestone, I decided to update some charts from earlier posts on the U.S. iTunes app store. First, the weekly growth in the number of apps was slower in November: the number of apps grew less than 10% on a weekly basis for all of November. During the last week of November, there were close to 9,800 unique apps, 22% of which were free.

The average price of a Top 100 paid app continued to decline, falling to a little over $2.60 in the last week of November:

Since high-priced top-sellers actually inflate the MEAN price, I created an alternate chart using the median (the decline in the MEDIAN price is even sharper). The corresponding price distribution continued its downward shift as it becomes harder for high-priced apps to crack the Top 100 paid apps list.

Having more than doubled over the last two months, Gaming remains the largest category accounting for a quarter of all apps. The fastest growing categories were Education and Lifestyle. Medical is the newest app category and as of the end of November there were over 80 medical apps, the 10 most popular of which were free. Among Game apps, Racing, Music, and Sports were the fastest growing Game sub categories.

There has been a slight increase in the proportion of Games priced at 99 cents or lower:

Finally, I computed the share of free apps by category and found that some of the smaller categories have a higher share of free apps. Social Networking apps tend to be apps designed to help users access social web sites from their iPhone, while News apps do the same for news/media sites. In both the Social Networking and News categories, the Free outnumber the Paid apps.

I didn't revisit my previous analysis of the top-selling apps, but I suspect not much has changed since my post at the beginning of November. Among the items I do hope to cover in the future is an analysis of app publishers.