What Kind And How Much? - The Mac App Store Distribution At A Glance

Earlier today, the The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted an interesting article and nice summary and analysis of how the Mac App Store looked "by the numbers." TUAW's breakdown was based on information they pulled form the United Kingdom Mac App Store and is based off general calculations. Kindly enough, they back the statistics with the process used to obtain and finalize the figures. While most developers tend to release their apps worldwide, some do restrict by region, so those would not be included. The two statistics that were chosen to be outlined include category and price popularity. I want to remind readers that these aren't sales figures, though I suspect it wont' take long for some developers to come forward and brag, but rather these numbers depict the number of apps available in those categories and which price points all apps and all categories fall under.

TUAW located 2,004 listings of apps, where 959 were actual apps (unique), available in the UK Mac App Store at the time. Of those apps, about 600 were listed in the Games category with Utilities and Productivity holding a decent second place of around 200 apps each. As I have noticed myself in the iOS App Store, most Entertainment apps are also considered "games".

The Entertainment category is a bit of a red herring -- almost all of the 200 apps in it are also present in the Games category

I personally find it nice, but yet still at least a little surprising, that the Education realm is holding a reasonable 4th place, almost doubling the Music and Photography sections. Apple had once severely dominated the domain and the Mac is considered simple to use and a powerful tool for creative outlets and media. The iOS App Store infancy held a huge range in price, mostly quite high, as developers had no real basis for what mobile users would be willing to plunk down. As the store matured, price tags slowly settled into a natural acceptable groove. The Mac App Store opens up another new can of mysteries for devs. Can they charge the same as a physical copy on a store shelf, charge more for the convenience, or is the spoiled $1-5 range of many iOS apps going to taint the personal computer software punch bowl? While we don't have sales figures quite yet, TUAW shows us what some early developers have decided upon offering. It's important to note that a number of game offerings are available in the iOS App Store and other platforms, so it's likely tough to decide whether to maintain an equal price point.

From the most apps to the least, we see $20-50, $10-20, $4-5, $1, $0, $2, $5-10, $3, $50-100, and $100+. I don't feel that seem so bad. There are a few $20, $30, and even spendier apps for our iDevices. That's not really a fair comparison, however, if you realize that Adobe Photoshop CS5 is ~$700, iLife '11 (retail store package) is ~$50, QuickBooks 2011 is ~$185, and so on, things don't seem at all out of whack. It it interesting to note that TUAW found the most expensive app, once again at the time of posting their article and from the UK Mac App Store, to be Distribute. "Distribute is a single user, purchase, inventory and sales manager built exclusively for Mac OS X" and available in the Mac App Store for £399.99/$700USD. Some may be gasping for air after seeing that price but any software targeted at companies, which in turn use it to make profit, normally carries quite a premium price tag. To me, this doesn't appear out of line from initial predictions, including veteran app buyer guestimates. As always, what tells the true story are sales and profit numbers. It will be interesting to see how quickly this new portal becomes a success, because we all know it will somehow. Until then, check out First Look: The Mac App Store and, of course, just go virtual window browsing yourself. As a reminder, the Mac App Store is only available on compatible computers running the recently released Mac OS 10.6.6.

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