Reading, Writing, and Reflecting

As I’ve written in this blog a few times, like many, I’ve become an addicted smart phone user.  In this post, I laid out my iPhone App storage usage patterns vs the average usage patterns, and raised some questions about the future growth and characteristics of users of these platforms.

Now, I’ve come across some even more robust external data from the site Mobile Entertainment (ME) sets analyzing App usage of different smartphones which provide some further insight into the questions I raised in that previous post.     Embedded below is a presentation with 157 Mobile App stats that ME has released and says we should all know about.   Some fascinating data here.

Some of the more interesting stats to me are:

• The sheer # of applications in the iPhone AppStore vs Android and Blackberry—2x more than Android and a whopping 32x more than Blackberry (225K for the Iphone, 105K for Android, and only 7K for Blackberry).  In a world that is moving more and more to Applications (Wired magazine has even claimed recently that the web is dead to apps in this article) , Blackberry is going to find itself in a world of hurt and simply a niche market, particularly as the iphone gets more business acceptance from CIOs.

• 7% of iphone and ipod touch owners have spent more than $50 on paid apps over the last 3 months.    That’s an impressive core enthusiast group.  I consider myself as a heavy user but don’t come close to that level of spend.  While this isn’t revealed in the data set, my guess is that this 7% of iphone and ipod touch users, represent close to 50% or more of the appstore revenue.   Not exactly the 80/20 rule as I think there are lots of users buying small amounts of paid apps, but a significant number nonentheless.

• 37% of Iphone users play 1 game or more a day with their an iPhone.    I previously worked in the mobile gaming industry at Glu Mobile and this is the stat that has made mobile industry leaders like EA, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and other gaming platform leaders like Sega, Konami, and others focus heavily on this platform.

• E-bay expects to earn $1.5B in mobile revenue in 2010.   Their iphone App has been downloaded 11 million times.  Anyone who says mobile won’t ever be a significant monetary platform is just wrong—EBay saying they will have $1B in revenue this year and Amazon reaching the same milestone is proof that it certainly will.

Some great insights into the burgeoning mobile application, content, and entertainment space.    And the crazy thing is the market is still at its infancy— a long and winding ride is still ahead of us to see where the mobile market ultimately goes!