14 DAY TRIAL // Distimo, an app-store analytics company, issued its special iPad Report today, based on April 6, 2010 data. Its findings include the total number of iPad-only applications available so far, and a breakdown by genre, popularity and price.
Distimo provides in-depth reports for companies interested in the mobile-application ecosystem. It does so by providing valuable insight into important trends happening within application stores, including Apple’s, while offering developers a free analytics tool to monitor their own and competitive applications across all app stores. It is called the “ Distimo Monitor.” Developers needn’t make any adjustments to their application's code to employ the tool.
Distimo’s latest report, targeting the iPad, focuses particularly on the Apple App Store in the United States. According to the analytics company, on April 6, 2010 there were exactly 2,385 applications available exclusively for the iPad. The largest category on the iPad was Games, Distimo soon found out, with 833 titles (35%), followed by Entertainment and Education with 260 and 205 titles, respectively.
Not surprisingly, Games and Entertainment applications are more popular on the iPhone than on the iPad. Users have barely made their acquaintance with the device. Some 70% of the most popular applications on the iPhone are published in one of those categories, compared with 40% on the iPad, the report claims. One other reason might be that 83% of the applications on the iPad are paid, whereas only 73% of all applications are paid on the iPhone.
Surely, the biggest reason why entertainment apps are more popular on the Apple handset seems to be the sheer number of titles available for the iPhone (currently some 170,000), yet Distimo’s report breaks its analysis in smaller increments.
Continuing to enumerate its findings, Distimo claims that $3.61 is the average price of all paid applications that are solely compatible with the iPad. This compares to $3.55, for applications compatible with the iPhone, although this offers little to no indication as to whether price is a factor in download popularity.
One interesting finding is that medical applications are the most expensive of all, on both the iPad ($9.39) and the iPhone ($10.73). Education apps are not much different, from a price standpoint, being averaged at $9.10. Those listed in Healthcare & Fitness ($4.41) seem to fall at the other end of the segment, while Music apps have customers forking for an average of $6.86 at the time of the download. Some apps are significantly more expensive on the iPad, Distimo says.
Finally, Books are currently cheaper on the iPad than on the iPhone, Distimo has found. The analytics firm believes this is because of the iBookstore availability on the iPad. A simpler observation (if we may), would be that books simply must be cheaper and more accessible on the iPad with, or without the iBookstore – e-reading is one of the iPad’s key features.