

Overwhelming majority of iPhone's 100,000 apps are unused - adriand
http://www.pcworld.com/article/181448/apples_app_store_100000_apps_but_most_are_unused.html

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gcheong
100,000 is not that many and I believe it's only the tip of the iceberg.

Installed != in use and is not a proxy for how frequent someone uses an app.
It's like saying the majority of books go unread so that deflates the meaning
of Amazon claiming to be Earth's biggest bookstore. It's also not a very good
argument against having more books.

"But does the finding take a bit of steam out of the company's size-centric
marketing push? You'd better believe it."

How? If you have 100,000 apps vs 10,000 apps the chances are greater that your
users will be able to find an app that suites their needs.

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jsz0
Isn't this the status quo for any popular platform?

The best example I can think of is video game consoles since all the sales
numbers are tracked. The attach rate (average number of games sold per
console) is pretty low. The Xbox 360 leads this generation of consoles with an
attach rate of 7 games per console. There are nearly 1000 Xbox 360 games. So
that means the average Xbox 360 owner only buys 1% of the games available for
the platform. It's impossible to know how often they actually play the 7 games
they buy. Of course there is a real difference between a $60 Xbox game and a
99 cent iPhone app but I feel like the model is basically the same regardless
of price. The model works because there are enough users with different
interests/tastes to support a big application catalog.

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patio11
Popularity of just about anything is a zipf distribution, although the
AppStore is a special case because of the winners win effect. (Winners win in
SEO, too, but it is less of a total shutout because there are so many queries.
If you think about it, the AppStore is just a private Internet with a
braindead search engine on top that can only display the results to a few
dozen hardcoded search queries.)

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snprbob86
Here's a thought:

What is the average number of published apps per developer?

If we assume 10 (very high), at $100/year, that's $1,000,000 for just one
year.

More realistically, developers are producing one or maybe a couple apps. Many
people have also released 0, simply paying the $100 for the right to play with
it. Let's say the lowest is 1 app per developer. That's $10,000,000.

So Apple is making somewhere between $1M and $10M in subscriptions before
considering renewals or _royalties_.

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tedunangst
How many app reviewers does Apple have? Probably more than 10, so right there
goes $1M out the window. iPhone dev subscriptions is probably the least
profitable of all Apple "products".

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Xixi
To begin with, I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone dev subscription was
there simply to lower the number of apps to review, and hence the number of
app reviewers needed.

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snprbob86
The $ is much more likely to guarantee you have a credit card number and
address. Just in case someone does something unscrupulous.

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JoeAltmaier
Apple invented the store to get free software development effort at little
risk to themselves, and discover what apps were most compelling on the iPhone.
At this point they could shut the store, keep the 25most-used apps, and the
average iPhone customer could hardly tell the difference.

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StrawberryFrog
Apple still hypes the absolute number of apps in the store, probably because
they can measure it. But past a certain point, it doesn't matter.

Who cares anymore how many videos are on YouTube, for example? Answers could
be "enough", "too many" or "all of them".

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amichail
What about the Genius feature? Maybe it should be turned on by default?

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Zev
Somehow, I imagine it would be a privacy nightmare if Apple were to enable
Genius by default. People would say that Apple cared more about money than
privacy. Genius works by explicitly telling Apple they can go through your
purchases to recommend other, similar things to you.

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danielrhodes
Well it's not like they don't already know what you purchased. Netflix and
Amazon don't ask permission to give you recommendations.

