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.

In the same period in the Apple App Store for iPhone ‘only’ 63K applications have been added. In the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and BlackBerry App World 35K and 22K applications have been added in the past four months.

But as the sales of tablets with Android start to pick up and consequently the number of applications optimized for tablet also increases, it is fair to compare the number of applications in Google Play with that of the iOS platform as a whole. We have reported in our monthly publication that there are over 180K iPad applications available in the United States. However, the majority (61%) of those are universal applications (one package for both iPhone and iPad), hence these are counted as one application. Therefore as of April 2012 there are over 600K applications available for iOS. In the graph below the number of applications on both platforms are displayed over the past six months.

What can be observed is that Google Play is slowly catching up with the Apple App Store for iOS (30K more new applications added over the past six months), but the difference is still quite large (110K).

The majority of the applications are still offered for free in Google Play; only 28% of the content is paid for while in the Apple stores the majority of the content is paid. Moreover, the proportion of applications that feature in-apps is still quite low with 2% compared to the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad with 6% and 10% respectively.

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.

On Tuesday 8th of May the Mobile Convention Amsterdam is taking place. This event for mobile marketing and business is seeing its third edition in the Beurs van Berlage.

We are happy to announce that Distimo is participating with a presentation in the business track. The focus of this track is:

What are the chances and opportunities of business in a Mobile World? It’s all about e-commerce, services, sales and your business processes. Get the right overviews and insights and be inspired by leading cases.

Distimo presentation details:

Title: Market shifts in content distribution
When: Tue 8 May 2012 @ 12.45u

Description:
Distimo tracks the daily performance of every app in every app store worldwide. Based on our analysis, we will go into important market shifts in the way mobile content is distributed and monetized. We will share a free cross-platform app monitoring and analytics tool for developers that offers a variety of deep benchmarking capabilities to help developers maximize their app store revenues across nine different app stores and extend the global geographic reach of their apps. We will also highlight the latest trends in mobile content consumption around the globe. Hear not only how this market is shifting, but also what this means for you if you are developing or distributing mobile content.

Please find the full program here and if you’d look to meet-up at the conference, please send us a note. See you there!

If you are a developer and interested to have your say, start the survey here. There are several prices for survey participants and the results will be available in Q2 2012 as a free downloadable report.

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.

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.

Downloads by Country for Google Play

Google now provides country specific download volumes for Google Play apps. With Distimo Monitor you can now find out in which countries your apps are generating the most downloads and discover new local market opportunities.

Support for Samsung Apps

If you’re developing for Bada or have Android apps in the Samsung App Store, you will now be able to monitor their downloads, rankings, revenues and reviews. Adding Samsung Apps is as easy as adding any other store to Monitor.

Support for Smaato Ads

Next to AdMob, Adfonic, iAds and inMobi, we’ve now added Smaato to the list of supported ad networks. Are you using Smaato ads in your apps? Simply add them to Monitor and start monitoring their performance, using our powerful analytics environment.

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.

Based on our large data set, Distimo tries to give developers and publishers exactly those insights they need to deal with this explosion of games! I will explain what the best publishing strategies are for game developers; in what stores and platforms do you have to publish and what countries are driving the current global download volume? Moreover, monetization strategies that will bring in the greatest rewards for game developers nowadays and differences across games types are discussed.

I will also give a short demo on how you can use our analytics tool, Distimo Monitor, to track the performance of your own games and how Distimo can help you to get higher conversion and better insights in your sales funnel.

Ticket prices are available from €178.50 (student €75.-) and can be purchased on their website. Untill March, 16th, Festival of Games runs an early bird promotion where you get two tickets for the price of one.