iPhone 5 and iOS 6 Cause App Store Download Surge in August

Mobile apps marketing firm Fiksu, Inc. reports that demand for the iPhone 5 caused a decrease in app downloads and mobile app marketing costs in August. iOS 6 helped as well, the tracker said.

The company’s indexes measure monthly download fluctuations, including the cost to acquire loyal users, in order to help mobile app marketers assess their performance.

According to the Fiksu App Store Competitive Index, which measures the average aggregate daily download volume of the top 200 free apps in the United States, demand dropped by 7.3 percent to 4.05 million daily downloads in August, one month ahead of the iPhone 5 launch.

This is compared to 4.37 million downloads in July. Also in August, the Fiksu Cost per Loyal User Index decreased by 20 cents to $1.34 – about 13 percent down from $1.54 in July.

According to Micah Adler, CEO of Fiksu, “August was like the calm before the storm for app marketers. Similar to the period preceding the iPhone 4S launch in 2011, we saw users once again holding off on downloading apps in the weeks before the much-anticipated iPhone 5 launch.”

“App marketers also took the gas off their advertising spending during August, awaiting the availability of iOS 6 in September and the chance to promote updated apps. The combined effect made for a slow month overall ahead of what we expect to be a busy Q4,” said Adler.

Fiksu acknowledges that after the iPhone 5 hit stores on September 21, it took just one weekend for the company headquartered at 1 Infinite Loop to sell 5 million units, “beating the opening weekend for the iPhone 4S by 1 million units.”

As such, Fiksu’s September Indexes are expected to tell a very different story, the tracker said.

“In fact, we expect mobile app marketers to experience an early ‘Christmas in September,’ as new iPhone 5 users download apps for weeks after the launch,” said Fiksu.

See the official Fiksu site here for the full analysis.