Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) said it has reached the milestone of 15 billion app downloads from its App Store. The store now has a total of 425,000 applications for iPhones and iPads. Most of the apps are probably never downloaded, and those that are often go unused.
When Apple’s apps numbered 100,000 in 2009, tracking service AppsFire researched how many of these were ever downloaded. The conclusion was that after the 1,000 most popular apps, download activity dwindled close to zero.
The unused app analysis makes sense. How many apps can one user use? There may be some geeks who have 5,000 apps on their iPhones, if the processor on the smartphone can even handle that load. Most people need much less. Apple’s store shows that games are the most popular downloads. Many are free. Most cost only a dollar or two. Games helped drive PC and console sales a decade ago. The demand has moved to handsets and for now handset sales are likely to be helped by game use for some time.
Beyond games, most of the popular downloads based on Apple’s own app figures are for utility, information, social network access, and search. There are only a limited number of news apps most people need. Once they get beyond USA Today and CNN, there is not much utility to the Swedish car review app. Sports news apps are likely to have a similar pattern. There are the ESPN and CBS Sports apps. Those cover every major sport and event. Search apps use does not go much beyond Google, maps, and GPS. Utility apps are dominated by clocks, compasses and calculators that can perform simple math and measure tax deductions. Facebook and Twitter almost certainly make up most of the social network download activity.
The 15 billion app download number is an example of the roulette that goes on in mass markets when developers gamble that their applications are the ones that will get a million downloads. There is money to be made at those levels, probably, but users have to sort through huge libraries of options to get to new apps. That is not likely to happen
Douglas A. McIntyre
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