The mobile apps industry is suffering from download-milestone overkill. Developers and publishers boast about how many times their apps have been downloaded on the various app stores, while analysts and the store owners themselves use downloads as a key metric to gauge the success of those stores. While these figures aren’t meaningless, they’re only a guide to potential success.
There are two new pieces of research that illustrate the problem. First, research2guidance, which has published a report comparing the average daily downloads per app on various stores, taking Apple’s App Store as the benchmark. The report claims that “apps on Nokia’s Ovi Store had 2.5 times higher download numbers in Q2 2011 compared to apps on Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) App Store”: 160% more average daily downloads per app.Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace was 80% up on the App Store by the same analysis, with RIM’s BlackBerry App World up 43%. Google’s Android Market was down slightly (5%), while stores from Samsung, LG (SEO: 066570), GetJar and Palm (NYSE: HPQ) were further down.
Download numbers are no guide to how much money is being made. They don’t tell you how many apps are being sold, and they can only give an indication of the potential an app has for making money from in-app purchases and/or advertising.
This isn’t a pro-Apple anti-everyone-else viewpoint. There are plenty of companies trumpeting iOS download figures with no indication of how many people are actively using their apps, or how much money they’re making. Meanwhile, all the evidence suggests that while some apps can generate monster downloads on the App Store, many many more aren’t being downloaded at all.
The second current piece of research that filters into this discussion comes from analyst firm Ovum’s new report on mobile apps. It predicts that Android will overtake iPhone this year for the total number of app downloads – 8.1bn to 6bn – with the gap widening to 21.8bn and 11.6bn by 2016.
These are big, meaty figures that are likely to fuel many more “Android overtaking iPhone” headlines in the days ahead. Yet downloads only tell part of the story again: Ovum thinks that in 2016, iPhone will generate $2.86bn of paid app revenues compared to Android’s $1.5bn...
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-its-time-to-stop-using-downloads-as-the-key-metric-for-apps-successhttp://paidcontent.org/article/419-its-time-to-stop-using-downloads-as-the-key-metric-for-apps-success
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