The U.S. iTunes App Store(美国iTunes App Store) [O'Reilly Radar 中文站]

The U.S. iTunes App Store(美国iTunes App Store)

Ben Lorica 2008-08-15

With the iTunes App store now over a month old, I decided to look closely at data from the U.S. store over the last three weeks. While sales numbers are not publicly available, Apple publishes overall as well as category-level rankings. There are currently just over 1,800 (paid and free) applications in the App store, double what it was three weeks ago. Games is the largest category with about 500 applications (roughly 27% of all apps), up 87% from three weeks ago. Puzzles, Arcade, and Board games are the three largest Gaming subcategories:

The fastest-growing category, Education, more than tripled over the last three weeks.

The average price per paid app is around $5.50, with 94% of apps priced at $10 or less. Prices vary considerably by category with expensive apps skewing the average price in a category: a single application priced at $449 drove up the average price of Finance apps to more than $22. Excluding the top and bottom 1% priced apps, the average price of an iPhone application is about $5.20. Similarly, by removing the top and bottom priced app in each category, we get a more reasonable estimate of the average price per app within a category (click here for details).

The Book category is comprised mostly of ebooks and while there are over 150 such "apps", it was the only category not represented in the Top 100 rankings:

In contrast, more than 1 in 10 of all Music apps were among the Top 100 Paid Apps:

Looking beyond the Top 100 paid apps to all paid iPhone applications, the best-performing categories (in terms of popularity) are Music, Weather, Navigation, Lifestyle, and Entertainment (click here for details).

On average, app providers have slightly over one app each, with 25 (out of the close to 1,100) providers accounting for about 21% of all paid apps:

Most providers had 0 or 1 app listed in the Top 100 Paid Applications, with the following exceptions: Hottrix, Pangea Software, Inc., Phase2 Media, telience.com, and Electronic Arts all had 2 apps in the Top 100 list. For now, the cohort of web developers who dominate the Facebook application platform have been unable to make similar inroads in the iPhone platform. Perhaps it's time to brush up on Cocoa and Objective-C?

翻译：xiaochong

iTunes App Store开张一个多月，我决定仔细看一下美国店最近三周的数据。销售数据没有公开，苹果只发布了总体情况以及按类别的排名情况。目前有超过1800个（收费或免费的）应用，是三周前的两倍。最大的类别游戏大约有500个应用（大约占所有应用的27%），比三周前增长87%。Puzzles、Arcade、Board是最大的三类游戏：

增长最快的类别是教育类，是三周前的三倍多。

收费应用的平均价格为5.5美元左右，94%的应用定价在10美元或更少。价格在不同类别之间差别相当大，有些很贵的应用足以影响所在类别的平均价格：金融类别中一个449美元的应用将平均价格拉到22美元多。不算价格最高和最低的1%应用，iPhone应用的平均价格应该是5.20美元。同样，如果不计算每一类别中最高和最低的应用，我们就能得到一个每类别中应用更合理的平均价格估算（详细情况请参照这里）。

图书类大多数都是电子图书，有150多个这样的“应用”，这也是唯一一个没有出现在前100名中的类别：

相反，超过10%的音乐应用出现在收费应用前100名中：

通过前100名收费应用和所有收费iPhone应用可以看出，最突出的类别（从受欢迎程度来看）是音乐、天气、导航、生活方式以及娱乐（详细情况请参照这里）。

平均来讲应用提供商有稍微一个多应用提供，25个（总共将近1100个）提供商占了所有收费应用的21%：

大多数提供者有一个或者没有应用进入前100名收费应用名单，但有如下例外：Hottrix、Pangea Software, Inc.、Phase2 Media、telience.com以及Electronic Arts都有两个应用在前100名中。现阶段大量在Facebook平台上成功的Web开发人员还没有在iPhone平台上有相似的作为。也许是时候该研究研究Cocoa和Objective-C了？