Common Dream

iPhone App Store Secrets By Pinch Media

A good, but dated, look into some stats about the App Store by Greg Yardley at Pinch Media (now Flurry) based on more than 30,000,000 app downloads worth of data. I ran across it looking for data about free versus paid apps in the App Store, and there were some real gems on that front:

  • Free apps ended up with 7.5 times as many unique users as paid apps in the sample.
  • Free apps were only run 6.6 times often as the paid apps in the sample.
  • Free apps were only run 3.9 times more total time than paid apps.
So, although free apps were downloaded much more frequently, they were run less often and were kept open significantly lower amounts of time. In the presentation Greg also breaks out a calculation of how much you need on the CPM front for advertising to make sense for your app.