The Impact Of App Discounts And The Impact Of Being A Featured App

Posted on by Gert Jan Spriensma

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.

Gert Jan Spriensma

GSMA Announces Mobile Awards Nominees In Partnership With Distimo

Posted on by Vincent Hoogsteder

The GSMA today announced nominees for the 17th annual Global Mobile Awards. The winners will be presented on Tuesday, 28th February at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. In total, 158 nominees have been shortlisted for this year’s Global Mobile Awards; the full list of nominees and awards categories can be found here.

Market data for the ‘Best Mobile App for Consumers’ and ‘Best Mobile App for Enterprise’ categories was provided by Distimo. These are the nominees:

Best Mobile App for Consumers
Facebook
for Facebook Messenger
Outfit7
for Talking Tom Cat 2
Rovio Mobile Ltd.
for Angry Birds Rio
Yobonja
for Blast Monkeys
Zynga
for Hanging With Friends
Best Mobile App for Enterprise
Cisco Systems, Inc.
for Cisco AnyConnect
Citrix Online
for GoToMeeting
Citrix Systems
for Citrix Receiver
SouthLabs
for SharePoint Mobile Client
Square, Inc.
for Square
Vincent Hoogsteder

Same Apps Have Different Age Rating in Apple App Store and Google Android Market

Posted on by Tiuri van Agten

The age rating systems are a major issue in some countries for applications stores. No global or united age rating system is established yet among the major application stores, despite attempts by the CTIA Wireless. Therefore, we wondered whether similar apps have different age ratings across the two largest application stores: Apple App Store for iPhone and Google Android Market. The answer is yes, they do!

We studied the Apple App Store for iPhone’s top 200 overall free and paid of last Friday in the United States and matched those apps with similar applications in Android Market. This resulted in a sample of 117 apps that were available in both the Apple App Store and Google Android Market. One could expect that this sample would have a similar distribution of age rating in both stores. However, this is not the case. The pie charts clearly show that the lowest age rating tier (4+) is used more often in Apple App Store for iPhone than in Google Android Market. This 4+ rating tier is the largest tier for the apps in the Apple App Store with 73% of applications belonging to this tier, while only 42% of the same applications have the lowest rating tier in Android Market. Moreover, 37% of the apps in this sample had a “Low Maturity” rating in Android Market, while only 9% of these apps have an age rating of 9+ (second tier) in the Apple App Store.

In general, developers are responsible for rating their apps, which must be done in line with the stores’ guidelines. However, these guidelines vary across stores, which explains the differences in the age rating distribution above. For example, Android’s guidelines state that apps with user to user communication or apps that publish users’ location must be rated as “Medium maturity”. Apple does not have such requirements for functionalities but only for the content of the app itself. The age rating of social apps like Twitter and Facebook illustrate this point clearly. These apps have a medium maturity (3rd rating tier) in the Android Market, but only the lowest age rating (4+) in the Apple App Store. However, the variety in rating guidelines does not explain the enormous age rate gap between Apple App Store and Android Market for ‘QR Reader’ by Tapmedia. This app is qualified as low maturity in Android Market, while this app has the highest age rating category, 17+, in the Apple App Store.

Tiuri van Agten

New Distimo Monitor Release: Insight Into Ad Networks

Posted on by Tijmen Ruizendaal

Distimo Monitor‘s latest release further increases insight in the performance of your mobile ads by using the same fully customizable interactive charts that you’ve used to monitor the performance of your apps. Use the Smart Filters to get granular information on performance per ad, ad network and country over a given timespan. Get insight in key metrics, such as fill rates, eCPM and eCPC.

Analyze Mobile AdsZoom in, compare and adjust accordingly.

As the effectiveness of your ads may differ per country and ad network, you may want  to adjust your ad strategy accordingly in order to maximize revenue. In Distimo Monitor, you can easily compare your ads’ performance per network and country, allowing you to make well-founded decisions and increase your revenue.

Pick your business model
There are a number of options to generate revenue from your apps. Popular options are the inclusion of ads, charging one-off fees, using in-app purchases, or a combination of these. Distimo Monitor provides insight in a complete spectrum of app store and ad network metrics, so you can experiment, measure and determine what works best for you.
App Ad Analytics Support
App Analytics Dashboard

Customize your dashboard with widgets
You are now able to add, arrange and remove as many widgets as you like on the dashboard. More importantly, you can determine the dataset for each widget individually, allowing you to create your own customized overview of the apps that are most important to you.
About Distimo Monitor

Distimo Monitor is the free web-based app store analytics tool for app developers. All major app stores and mobile ad networks are supported. View all downloads, revenues, rankings, translated reviews, ratings and events of your apps in one place. Compare the ranks of your apps with others and benchmark your apps against the market.

For a full list of features head over to the Monitor features page or start using Distimo Monitor today by signing up for free. For questions, comments and feature requests, feel free to contact the Monitor team, or follow @distimomonitor on twitter.

Tijmen Ruizendaal

Changing App Search On The Desktop

Posted on by Vincent Hoogsteder

Yesterday I noticed something strange in my own behavior to get an app on the desktop. I wanted to download a video app for the Mac, went into Google, searched, and downloaded one. After firing up the app, I started to wonder what comparable stuff would be in the Mac App Store. Then it occurred to me that I had not even considered going there first, but automatically just went to Google. Whereas after going to the Mac Store, I found something better and I love the store because it keeps your apps when moving to a new device easy like a charm and centralizes updates. So why didn’t I go there in the first place?

On smartphones, users are educated from the moment they activate their phone on how and where to get apps. Want an app? Open the phone’s app store and off you go. But on the desktop, this is different.

For years, consumers were used to go into a store and buying a nice box with installation CD, which was increasingly replaced by searching Google and downloading the software from the vendor’s website. Now parties like Apple and Microsoft are placing app stores in their existing desktop environments. These stores have many advantages over the preceding ways to get software, but they do not force the user to change his behavior. They don’t even actively motivate the user to open up the store. Consumers that already have an existing suite of software on their desktops can just carry on as they are used to, with possibly ignoring the store outright.

When sitting behind a desktop and searching for either phone or desktop apps, many consumers go to Google. That’s also the reason why all major app stores have launched web versions of their storefronts. If every consumer would open iTunes on his desktop when searching an iPhone app, Apple would not need to run a web storefront. Search engines are therefore increasingly integrating app store listings in their search results.

So what can be done to educate consumers that their desktop app store is also the central place to get your app, instead of search? In the end, it’s all about developer & hardware manufacturer push from their regular channels, so consumers discover their desktop stores and its advantages. A nice example is Evernote, which recognizes a Mac when you visit their site, and when you go to “Get Evernote”, you a directly pushed in the Apple Mac App Store to download it. Second example is Apple that now distributes OS updates solely via its app store. If developers and manufacturers en-masse adapt to such distribution choices, consumer will still initially find their apps through Google, but if they end up in the Mac App Store on their desktop every time, it gets a fair chance that the consumer opens this store the next time he searches for content instead of a search engine.

For developers, the choice to push their consumers in the Mac App Store, instead of distribution via their own channel boils down to monetization. When the store offers new opportunities in monetization that start to prove, such as in-app purchases, and when the uptake from being ranked as a paid app justifies the 30% revenue share cut to Apple, this makes a lot of sense.

Vincent Hoogsteder

BlackBerry DevCon Tickets Available to Distimo Monitor Users At 50% Discount

Posted on by Remco van den Elzen

BlackBerry App WorldBlackBerry DevCon is coming to Europe on February 7-8 2012. Distimo has 50% discount tickets available for Monitor users, which will give you access to the conference, and moreover, Research In Motion will be providing a FREE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet to attendees. Message from Research In Motion below:

Great, limited time offer for Distimo Monitor users – register before the 18th January 2012 for ONLY €125, saving €225 from full price. That’s a 50% discount on the Early Bird Offer.

On February 7-8, 2012, the BlackBerry Developer Conference will be coming to the Amsterdam RAI for the first time in Europe. This event will be the place where our developer community in Europe will come together to understand how to work with the latest innovations and breakthroughs for the BlackBerry® platform such as BlackBerry® 7, the new BBM™ Social Platform, BlackBerry® Tablet OS, Adobe® AIR®, Adobe® Flash®, BlackBerry® WebWorks™, BlackBerry 10 OS and more.

Whether you’re new to developing for the BlackBerry platform, or you’re an experienced app master, we’d like to invite you to attend and be on the leading edge of developing mobile apps for our 70 million-strong, app-hungry user base. So make sure you don’t get left behind: register now using your unique code DCJM65 to get your tickets at half price.

And, to help kick start development of your next application for our new platform, we will be providing a FREE BlackBerry PlayBook* tablet to attendees.

If you are already a Monitor user, sign in to receive your discount code. If you would like to start tracking and benchmarking your applications, sign up for Monitor now.

Remco van den Elzen

Distimo Featured Annual Report At Only €699

Posted on by Gert Jan Spriensma

Together with our full year 2011 publication, Distimo proudly presents a more in-depth study of the past year in three Paid Featured Reports. These reports offer deep insights into all major applications stores in North America, Europe and Asia. A single report can be purchased for the entry-level price of €699,-, with combinations of reports being discounted up to 20%.

Each Featured Report provides aggregated data of one particular region (Europe, Asia or North America) and gives a clear overview of the applications and publishers that were locally successful in each store and region during 2011. Moreover, market trends in terms of stores sizes, pricing and business models are presented in two individual data sets, being January and November 2011. Lastly, a closer look is provided on download volumes and revenues in the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad specifically. This annual featured paid report also includes revenue data for November from the Google Android Market.

The reports consist of a PDF presentation with in-depth analyses and an Excel file that contains all raw data. More details about the reports can be found on our website.

Gert Jan Spriensma

Google Android Market Tops 400,000 Applications

Posted on by Tiuri van Agten

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.

Tiuri van Agten

Top 10 Most Viewed Distimo Data Publications – 2011

Posted on by Vincent Hoogsteder

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

Vincent Hoogsteder

App Downloads More Than Tripled On Christmas Day

Posted on by Tiuri van Agten

The download volume of apps in the Apple App Store (United States) saw a dramatic increase this Christmas weekend. The download volume on Christmas Day increased by 230% compared to December’s daily average. On the 26th of December this was a 120% increase.

These calculations are based on transactional data gathered via Distimo Monitor, which represents 25% of total downloads in the Apple App Store US.

Most popular apps this Christmas in the United States? Facebook Messenger ranked first on the list of popular free apps in the Apple App Store for iPhone. The most popular paid app was Words With Friends.

Tiuri van Agten