When Apple announced that the App Store officially passed the 100,000 apps bar I think there were mainly two reactions:
1. It’s amazing and I love Apple
2. 100,000? Well most of them suck any way (any combination thereof is also plausible).
It’s indeed a good comment, what populates those virtual shelves? If there are 20,000 unused fart applications and 40,000 ebooks that nobody reads then 100,000 apps doesn’t seem that impressive anymore.
Fortunately the folks at AppsFire got some data that shows the reality is tough.
Indeed, only 20% of the apps present on the App Store drag attention to them. There is only a handful of applications that can reach the holly 50% of iPhones populated (let’s guess… Facebook, Shazam etc.) and the 1000th app reaches out to only 1.76% of users (it still represents like a million iPhones).
This “long tail” effect reinforces the idea that good marketing is the key to an apps success and that websites like AppAdvice.com become more essential in getting information about what’s going on.
Another problem that Apple should start getting concerned about is something consumer behavioral theorists call “overchoice”. You know, like when you’re in front of a shelf and the amount of effort it takes to choose between 50 similar products is greater than the actual benefit it brings you. It’s information overload. How can you help but to get frustrated?! Well like I said before, this is why sites like AppAdvice.com are here. So don’t get frustrated, we’re here to help!
[via AppsFire]
Yep, “… websites like AppAdvice.com become more essential in getting information about what’s going on …” is true – to a point.
It may be a symptom of the proportion of game apps out there, but I would find AppAdvice.com far more useful if they reviewed more non-game apps and fewer game apps.
I second that. I mean I enjoy games, but I get bored with them very quickly once the novelty factor wears off. What I really like to see it reviews of utility apps, clever ways to make my daily life easier or more fun (like Dropbox and Shazam). AppAdvice was the first App-review show I subscribed to, but due to the sheer amount of games being reviewed, I quickly found myself adding others to my subscription list as well.
I use mostly utilities myself and you’re absolutely right. We’re actually increasing our utilities reviews at the moment.
I would like to add a perspective on the “almost” insignificant apps.
I’m a french user from Québec, Canada. In world proportion, I believe that people from my corner of the world is probably “almost” insignificant in regards of these statistics.
Given said that, I have a lot of apps that are specific to my place and my language that will most probably never got in the top 1000 apps because they do not adress to global users but to specific user. Nevertheless, these apps are really changing days.
So we need to consider that within the 100,000 apps there is, beside craps, a lot of apps that simply focus to local people in each corner of the world. Therefore, my point of view when I see 100,000 apps at the store is that there is custom apps for everyone everywhere and this is really great.
I’d just like to agree with the “less games” motion. I have one game on my phone and it hardly sees any usage. I’m just not a ganer buy I’m always on the lookout for another app good enough to make my springboard (I only have three pages and I keep the original “three full rows and one on the bottom row” from the 1.1.3 days).
“…the amount of effort it takes to choose between 50 similar products is greater than the actual benefit it brings you.”
I’d really like to see AppAdvice actually pit these similar products against each other to help choosers know the pros and cons each of the duplicate apps have to offer. For the most part, app reviews have been based upon the quality of single apps, but this doesn’t really minimize the effort of choosing the best single straw in the haystack. To really know which Twitter client is the best (for example), we really need some head-to-head competitive reviews… a battle-of-the-apps, if you will. AppAdvice really hasn’t done much to alleviate the effort of ‘information overload’.