14 DAY TRIAL // A survey commissioned by US firm AppsFire on 1,200 iPhone owners shows that the average user has downloaded 65 apps from the iTunes App Store, for a final bill of $80. Free apps have accounted for 65% on the 1,200 devices, while the average price for paid apps has been around $1.56. AppsFire claims that it based its research on the analysis of what is installed on someone's iPhone/iPod touch by taking “a picture of what's exactly installed on each single iPhone.”
“We used a sample of 1200 appsfire users (meaning that we know precisely what each user has) and took anonymously (we insist on the privacy respect), a picture of what's exactly installed on each single iPhone. We then aggregated this data to produce a unique overview about what can be found 'on average' in an iPhone,” the company’s blog post reads.
AppsFire compares its survey to similar moves on behalf of AdMob, which released “a great piece of research based on a sample of 1000 iphone owners,” the company asserts. “But this research is based on declarative data,” AppsFire adds. Also in contrast with its own research methods, “Flurry has also some great data but is related only to apps that have installed their analytics code and can't provide a full and accurate picture about what's exactly installed in a given device,” AppsFire says.
Lastly, the US firm posts some important reserves to be taken into account by readers of its report. Those include the assumption that, “The price of each app has not changed since we do not know when each app has been installed and purchased.” Sample representativeness is also a field where AppsFire admits it can improve, and it will, according to its blog post. “We need first to make a split between iPhone and iPod Touch users. Next releases will include that. In addition, we need to make sure the windows/mac ratio is more clearly addressed,” the company explains.
Visit the AppsFire blog here or jump straight to the survey report here.