The data in this report is computed from a sample size of 200 applications, 25 million consumers and four platforms: Apple (iPhone and iPod Touch), Blackberry, JavaME and Google Android.
Top Download Volumes
Appearing in the iPhone Top 50 free section of the App Store is considered the holy grail of exposure, however what does this translate to in terms of actual downloads? Whether attempting to build an ad-revenue business model or drive free-to-paid conversions, this is a key statistic for developers to understand. The chart below shows average downloads per day for applications occupying each of the Top 10 slots in the iPhone App Store.
With over 20,000 downloads per day in the 10th spot to nearly 200,000 downloads per day in the top spot, it's not hard to appreciate the power of App Store placement. For the top spot, downloads can vary anywhere from 150,000 to 250,000 per day. Beyond the top two spots, deviation from the mean is minimal. Drivers of sales likely include a combination of basic concept appeal, strong consumer reviews, a catchy name, whether an application benefits from cross-selling by other applications, developer promotion and Apple promotion, among other things. While no single recipe for application download success exists, putting effort into understanding user behavior, maximizing promotions and improving product experience to improve an application's ranking is certainly a worthwhile pursuit.
The Weekend: It's App Download Time
When you think of the weekend, you might think of baseball, barbeques or camping, but now you may want to add downloading iPhone apps to that list. Looking at weekday vs. weekend download rates, our analysis reveals that consumers are over 30% more likely to download an App over the weekend compared to during the week. Furthermore, consumers seem to open up their wallets on the weekends by downloading paid apps at a higher rate than during the week. One hypothesis is that consumers tend to try more free apps during the week to figure out what they might buy when they have more time on the weekend.
Free games are downloaded 26% more on a weekend day than a weekday, while paid games are downloaded at almost 50% more. For applications, the numbers show similar patterns with 27% increases for free and 36% for paid. Before conducting this analysis, we expected a certain pop in downloads in weekend days (after all, people have more time) but we never expected the pop to be that high. With this observation, it may be worth it for developers to time early week launches to load up their first weekend's sales.
Free-to-Paid conversions: Can less be more?
Launching a free or "lite" version of an application on the iPhone has quickly become a staple go-to-market strategy: launch the free app to drive awareness and trial, and then up-sell the paid version to your installed base of "free" consumers. At the same time, measuring and improving the rate at which consumers upgrade from free to paid, how feature-rich to make a free version and testing different marketing messaging to improve conversions has been guess-work at best for developers.
Looking at a sample of applications and games with both free and paid versions, we found some interesting trends in the data, especially with respect to how conversion rates differ across applications and games with different download volumes.
Applications with less than 100k free downloads see their paid versions downloaded at a rate of 20% while developers with over a million downloads realize under 5%. The question is why? We have a few possible hypotheses.
Games and applications that pursue a niche garner a smaller following, and their users tend to have a higher purchase intention; consequently, they self-select themselves. As a result, consumers convert from free to paid users at a higher rate.
Games and applications that break into the top 50 get more exposure which attracts a mass market group of "free rider" consumers that habitually download the top free apps, but rarely purchase.
Smaller iPhone-only developers with unknown brands tend to get downloaded less frequently. However, with their entire business focused on the iPhone, they also tend to make the most out of their iPhone applications, building their applications from the ground up for the iPhone, better leveraging its functionality and trying more ways to drive free-to-paid conversions. On the other hand, larger players often port their apps (mainly games) from other platforms such as console, social networks and traditional mobile. While known brands can attract more free downloads, they tend to give away too much of the game and think less about maximizing free-to-paid conversion due to their perception that consumers already recognize their brands. Ultimately, they ship popular but poorly conceived games for the iPhone platform. As a result, free downloads are higher and paid conversions are lower.