We already know that the iPhone has quickly become one of the most important mobile platforms, and today, O'Reilly's Ben Lorica took a closer look at the developers behind the most successful applications on the iPhone. Currently, the App Store features about 40,000 different apps, and on average, a typical seller or developer will have about 3.42 apps in the store, though these numbers are somewhat skewed by a few highly prolific developers who publish a lot of apps that are relatively easy to create.
Obviously, a game developer won't be able to churn out new applications at the same rate as an eBook publisher. Game developers have, on average, 2.3 apps in the store (looking at data from the last week), while a typical eBook vendor is selling almost 18 apps right now.
Books are also currently the fastest growing category in the App Store (285% in the last three months), mostly because vendors can simply pack different texts into separate applications. Compared to other categories, productivity apps are only growing slowly, though the number of apps in this category still grew 58% over the last 12 weeks.
One-Hit Wonders
Looking only at paid apps, Lorica also found that 6.3% of all sellers have had an application that made it to the App Store's "Top Paid Apps" list, though about 80% of these were one-hit wonders. On average, a top paid app will remain in this list for 13 days.
While the App Store generally gives every developer a chance to showcase their products, for game developers, the picture is a bit less democratic. Here, the top 27 sellers account for 28% of all the apps that appeared in the Top Paid Games list. Puzzle games, by the way, represent 1 in 4 games in the store.
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