Driving more revenue
Just two months after the launch of the Mac App Store, the top 300 Mac apps are already generating half the revenue of a top 300 iPad ones in the US, according to a recent market report form app market researcher Distimo.
This is simply because the average selling price of the Mac apps is higher. Bringing good news to developers, Distimo says it is seven times higher in the Mac app store ($11.21) than on the iPhone ($1.57) and almost three times higher than on the iPad ($4.19).
Looking at the revenue generated by the Apple apps across their three stores, Distimo notes the top applications on iPhone generate 2.1 times the revenue of top applications on the iPad. The top paid applications on the iPad in turn generate 2.0 times the revenue of top paid applications in the Mac App Store.
The Mac App Store currently has just 2,225 apps, while the iPad had 8,099 applications two months post-launch. However the proportion of free applications in the Mac app store is lower than any other. Given that the Mac App Store usage and reach will grow substantially, it could soon become a developers' paradise, and the report signals that Mac App Store could boost Mac gaming.
Comparing Mac gaming with Windows, Distimo noted that it hasn't been a major hit as yet, though there are already 646 games in this store (29%). As more than 39% of the most popular applications are games, this is an area where developers can tap into.
Examining the revenue generated by the three Apple platforms, the report says that iPhone has by far the most applications downloaded every day. The number of top 300 paid downloads in the Apple app store for iPad is 5.3 times higher than in the Mac app store.
In fact, Apple announced that users downloaded over 1 million apps from the Mac app store 24 hours since its launch. "We're amazed at the incredible response the Mac App Store is getting," Steve Jobs said in a press release. "Developers have done a great job bringing apps to the store and users are loving how easy and fun the Mac App Store is."
The report clearly shows that Apple is still well ahead of other app marketplaces in terms of numbers. As of February 2011, the App Store for the iPhone had 314,644 applications, while the Android marketplace had around 175,000.
According to a Gartner research report, worldwide mobile application store downloads are forecast to reach 17.7 billion downloads in 2011, a 117% increase from an estimated 8.2 billion downloads in 2010. If analysts' projections on app stores were to come out true, Apple might generate more revenue from the iPad than the Mac by as soon as 2012.
