Orient express
The latest study from app store-watcher Distimo focuses on the Asian Apple App store market, and reveals that app downloads are growing rapidly in the Far East.
China is now the world's second biggest app market behind the US, with Japan, Korea and Taiwan also right up there. This map below gives an indication of total app download volume per country. The lighter the shade, the more downloads.
But developers are going to struggle to get Asian consumers to part with money. Only one percent of all downloads in China are paid-for, and while this rises to six percent in Japan, there's clearly a reluctance to part with money up-front.
In addition, in-app purchases haven't really caught on yet, with a smaller proportion of revenue in Asia coming from that source than in the US. However, growth in this area has been quite recent in the US, so that's probably a product of the maturity of the market. There's also the simple fact that average wages are lower in the Far East than in the US - in many cases markedly so.
Distimo also found that localized content is a bigger thing in Asia than in the West, with 34 percent of the most popular apps only popular in one region, compared to 20 percent in the US and UK. Just as in the West, games are by far the biggest category, which makes the figures for South Korea all the more remarkable when you consider the App Store doesn't offer games there, apparently.
The long and short of it is that, right now, there's a lot of opportunity for app developers in Asia, but that they will have to rely primarily on advertising for their revenue, for now at least.
