The App Store has now been around for several months, and the store is now full of a huge variety of applications. Anecdotally, it is clear that gaming is a huge driver in the store, but I wanted to take a closer look to see if I could verify that based upon data about the top applications in the store. Over the next couple of days, I’ll write up what I can see based upon some simple analysis.
I started with paid applications, wanting to understand what types of applications succeed as well as who is building them.
Share of Top Applications
Games is far and away the most popular category, holding nearly 50% of the positions in the top applications. Entertainment and Music are distant second and third, and then there’s the rest. Games, Entertainment, and Music consume fully 75% of the positions in the top applications.
Weighted Share of Top Applications
If you actually weight the applications to reflect that applications in top positions are more valuable than applications in lower positions, things skew even a bit more. Games grow to more than 50%, and Games, Entertainment, and Music together account for 77% of the top applications.
Detail: Average Cost of Games, Entertainment, and Music
How dominant are Games? Not only do they have the largest share of the top applications, but they also have the highest average price. Though Entertainment has the second position in terms of share of the top applications, the low average price hints that perhaps these applications tend toward lower value toys.
Share of Top Applications, Other
Things get pretty even once you get out of the big three- only a handful of applications in these categories command a share of the top applications.
Detail: Average Cost of Other Applications
Other applications tend to be priced between 1 and 3 dollars, with the lone exception being productivity applications, which command an extremely high price relative to pretty much every other category in the store.
Top Publishers, Weighted
One of the last things that I wanted to look for was whether there were companies that were tending to release multiple applications. Here’s the top ten publishers of paid applications, weighted by where their applications rank in the top applications.
| Rank | Publisher | # Apps | Score | Category |
| 1 | Pangea Software, Inc. | 4 | 392 | Games |
| 2 | Freeverse, Inc. | 3 | 287 | Games, Entertainment, Music |
| 3 | Electronic Arts | 3 | 195 | Games |
| 4 | Hottrix | 2 | 140 | Entertainment |
| 5 | gameloft (iDP) | 3 | 138 | Games |
| 6 | bootant.com | 2 | 133 | Games |
| 7 | Eric Metois | 1 | 116 | Entertainment |
| 8 | MooCowMusic | 3 | 115 | Music |
| 9 | Smallware | 1 | 113 | Games |
| 10 | Big Fish Games, Inc | 1 | 112 | Games |
As expected, Games, Entertainment, and Music dominate the top publishers.
Thoughts
A couple of things jump right out at you, having looked at the above data:
- Casual entertainment type usage is clearly the dominant category for applications on the iPhone. Although the iPhone is truly a mobile computer, users of the App Store are more interested in Gaming and Entertainment than they are in utility and computing.
- There is little consolidation in the publisher space. Although there are some big name publishers at the top of the list, most publishers have only one application on the list of top applications. Only a handful are successful enough to crack the list with multiple applications.
- Top applications are cheap- typically $3 or less.
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