iPad - Two Years In Review [Report]

Distimo has published an interesting report that looks back at the last two years of the iPad.

U.S. is Top Grossing Country:
Based on the top 200 most grossing applications across the world the United States is the top grossing country, while China (largest in terms of free downloads) is not even among the top five most grossing countries. Aside from the United States, the countries that developers should aim for if they have a one-off or in-app strategy are the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.


180,000 iPad Applications:
Two years post-launch, there are over 180K applications available in the Apple App Store for iPad in the United States as of February 2012, which means that the Apple App Store for iPad is growing at roughly the same pace as the Apple App Store for iPhone and Google Play, which had 200K and 175K applications available respectively, after two years in business.



China is Top Market for Free Applications:
The United States has been eclipsed by China as the largest market for free applications in the world for the first time in the history of the Apple App Store for iPad. During February 2012, the number of daily downloads among the top 300 most popular free applications in China exceeded 1.1M, while the volume among the top 300 most popular free applications on each day in the United States was just below 1M.


Top Newsstand Applications:
The top 5 top grossing Newsstand applications in February 2012 are: The Daily, NY Times, New Yorker, National Geographic, Cosmo.


In-App Purchases:
Ten percent of all applications in the Apple App Store for iPad feature in-app purchases compared to 6% in the Apple App Store for iPhone and 2% in Google Play. Moreover, the proportion of universal applications that feature in-apps is even higher (11%). When we look at the top 200 top grossing applications in each of those stores 74%, 80% and 56% of the applications feature in-app purchases in the Apple App Store for iPad, the Apple App Store for iPhone and Google Play, respectively.


Downloads and Applications Per Category:
The graph above shows the download volumes (noted in pink) of the top 100 most popular free applications per category, and the number of free applications (noted in grey) that are available in that category. When we divide the volumes by the number of available applications, we find a measure for the number of downloads per application in that category. There seems to be a big need for Weather (63x), Newsstand (45x), Entertainment (43x) and Games (32x).



Proportion of Rankings:
When we look at the Apple App Store for iPad, Games is the single most important type of application (50% of all top applications are Games). The Newsstand category is also bringing in a substantial proportion of the revenue, with over 7% of the top 200 grossing applications coming from this category. This revenue is almost solely based on in-app purchases.


App Stores Compared:
Compared to the Apple App Store for iPhone and the other stores that stock tablet applications, we see that the Apple App Store for iPad is the second largest store, after the Apple App Store for iPhone and Google Play in the United States. However, only a small proportion of applications in Google Play are optimized for tablets. When we look at the Samsung Appstore we see that roughly 32K Android applications are available in the device stores for tablets.



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