Fewer downloads, more user engagement costs

Fiksu has published data on app downloads from the App Store for September 2011: the number continued to fall, while publishers began to spend more money on marketing. Apple explains this by the fact that a lot of users were expecting the release of the new iPhone.

The number of downloads began to decline this spring; in parallel, marketing costs began to grow to attract loyal users: in September, they broke records over the past six months, increasing by +70 cents /user.

The graph shows the average number of downloads per day that generate the top 200 free iPhone apps:

The following graph shows the average cost of attracting a loyal user (those who have launched the application at least 3 times are considered loyal). In September, this amount reached $1.64:

Anthony Ha from AdWeeks commented: “On the one hand, these figures once again demonstrated the extreme dependence of developers and publishers on Apple. On the other hand, Apple itself depends on such changes – they blame everything on the fact that users were waiting for the release of the new iPhone and reduced their activity.”

“It seems to me that the decrease in the number of downloads can also be explained by the fact that users are already used to this kind of content – the time has passed when mobile applications were an absolute novelty.  Nevertheless, I believe that the appearance of new devices inevitably leads to an increase in software sales, so I think that in the next months we can expect an increase in downloads,” said Darrell Etherington from GigaOm.

Considering that sales of the iPhone 4S turned out to be very good – more than 4 million people have already bought the new device – we can only wait for fresh data to understand how this affected downloads. Fiksu promises to provide analytics for October at the end of November, but is already making optimistic forecasts.