Some interesting pricing stats in iPhone apps

Ben Lorica at O'Reilly has updated his analysis of pricing trends in iPhone apps. Although it doesn't include the actual sales figures for the apps, it does look at the number of apps in each price category and the top 100 most popular.

Some highlights:

During the last week of November, there were close to 9,800 unique apps, 22% of which were free:

The average price of a Top 100 paid app continued to decline, falling to a little over $2.60 in the last week of November:

 

In both the Social Networking and News categories, the Free outnumber the Paid apps. (Social Networking apps tend to be apps designed to help users access social web sites from their iPhone, while News apps do the same for news/media sites.):

Comments

[Hunter]

Supply? Meet demand...

Assuming the average user's demand for apps is the same as it was at first, but the number of apps available has increased dramatically, it makes sense that their price would decline.

Last graphic there is very interesting, showing what people are actually willing to pay for. Are those the preferences you would have expected?

[cleaning business]

Iphone or Itunes? The post says Iphone the diagrams say Itunes? There's a tail there either way I guess.

[Chris Anderson]

Same thing: the marketplace for iPhone apps is on iTunes.

[Jackson Miller]

@Hunter I don't think the last graphic shows what people are willing to pay for. It is not the share of installations, but rather the share of applications in the store. It would be very interesting to see the breakdown of installations by those same categories. I suspect the ratios would be much different.

[Skykomish]

As average prices continue to decline and the number of selections continues to increase and push more sales away from "blockbusters" at the head, the iPhone platform could cease to be profitable for professional commercial developers that have more overhead than just pizza and Coke. Is anybody afraid that the AppStore will come to offer little more than huge amounts of low-quality novelty content made by amateurs?

I've been following the video game portion of the store, and it appears that this is already happening: commercial publishers with the resources and skills to make high-quality product are turning away from the platform because it's increasingly difficult to break even with so many free hobbyist games flooding the market. Are users okay with this shift?

[David]

Im okay with this shift, the more designers and inventors forces the technology and creativity to advance further and faster than before.