Paid apps may one day overtake the free ones

Distimo does analytics for mobile app stores – it gathers data and information about how consumers interact with application stores. Today it has released it’s full report on the year of 2010, marking the major trends in how people’s use of stores changed over the year. And one of those trends shows that paid apps are becoming more popular.

What’s the story?

2010 was the year where applications truly exploded into the mainstream. In the full flush of youth, the market changed rapidly over the year – so this report from Distimo may be the most action-packed it ever has to release.

Distimo is mostly developer-end. Developer’s can use the analytics tools to keep track of how their products are doing on multiple app stores. By combining the analytics garnered from each separate developer, Distimo can create an in-depth report of the overall app store environment.

What app stores does it provide analytics for?

Short answer? All of them. You can see the full list here: http://www.distimo.com/appstores/

However, this report covers only use of the in-house app stores that service Apple, Blackberry, Android, Ovi, Palm and Windows devices.

What are the main points?

• Apple, unsurprisingly, still has the largest number of apps. It doubled it’s available applications from 150k to 300k over the year.
• Android was the fastest growing store, though. It’s available apps grew by 600% to 130k in the same period.
• Free apps are far more popular than paid. The top 300 free apps in the US got an average of 3 million apps every day during December. Paid apps only got 350k per day.
• Because of this, developers are looking for other ways to monetize their apps. In-app purchases seems to be the best bet for now – the highest grossing free apps more than doubled their revenue from in-app purchases on both iPhone and iPad.
• Business apps are becoming more popular in the Apple App Store, as the iPhone is increasingly viewed as a productivity tool. Bizarrely, the BlackBerry App World has been seeing more entertainment apps.
• Rovio continues to dominate mobile gaming with Angry Birds. The series appears in the top lists of all stores a total of six times.

And you can see the full report here: http://www.distimo.com/report/download-latest

What we think?

One of the things that most interests me from the report is that while free apps are massively more popular than paid apps, it might not always be that way. The popularity of paid apps is growing faster than free apps – by almost 30% between June and December 2010. It’s pretty unlikely that they will ever gain enough steam to overtake free apps, but it shows a developing split between mobile and on-line internet.

It’s something that has been bewailed repeatedly over the years: now that consumers are so used to getting things for free on the internet, how do you ever get them to start paying again? It really looks like mobile is going the same way, with free apps dominating the download charts. But it appears that people are increasingly willing to pay for apps – partly, perhaps, because free download apps tend to be festooned with payrolls, advertisements and limited content. If you want to get the good stuff, you have to be willing to pay.