Erictric

Sure Apple’s App Store is a huge success for… Apple. What about app developers? As I previously commented that with so many apps a lot of developers have a tough time fighting to be noticed and actually selling their stuff. Well now I have something to back up that statement, AdMob has released its Mobile Metric Report for May 2009 which looked at the actual usage of the thousands of applications on the App Store. The results are a bit shocking for all the iPhone/iPod Touch application developers:

You should take into account the most of the tracked apps were free, meaning most of us download free stuff just to test it and forget about them after one time use. Still many developers depend on their free stuff to advertise their paid premium applications. What this all means is that a huge percentage of applications on the App Store are crappy stuff just filling up empty space. While Apple is really proud to say more than 50,000 apps have been developed, they are not telling the real story; people only care about some of that huge number of applications. My advice for developers is to either perfect, and I really mean release high quality stuff  when it comes to applications for the iPhone/iPod Touch, or start developing for other devices with less applications (Palm Pre?). Either way, I don’t mean to discourage you or anything but face it, it is very unlikely you will become rich selling smartphone applications. Check out the full AdMob Mobile Metrics Report.

*Active user, as defined by AdMob is a user that used the application at least once during May 2009.