Trends in the field of mobile applications

Xyologic has published an application market study for August 2011. It includes: the number of downloads of applications by country, market growth indicators, ratings by country, the number of paid applications in relation to free and the turnover of the application market.

Here are the main conclusions of the study.

Success with only one platform

Although many iOS app publishers have already ported their apps to Android, so far almost none of them have achieved success on two platforms at once.

Users ignore Paid Android appsIn-game purchases in a paid app are becoming more common.

However, Android users prefer not to download paid apps at all (less than 1% of all downloaded apps are paid versus 23% for iOS apps).

For the international market – freemium-applications, for the local – paidIn most cases, publishers of freemium applications sell them all over the world, while developers for local markets are more inclined to the paid model, while releasing free “lite” versions.

The number of downloads in Europe and the USA is about the same

The volume of the markets of the most important European countries (including the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands) is comparable to the volume of the US application market: 702 million downloads in the US versus 668 million in Europe in August 2011.