App Store Shootout - week 1 results

The first week of my App Store shoot out results are in.

As a reminder the competitors in this race are

• Apple's App Store (get app) - the generally accepted "king of the hill" of application stores
• Nokia's Ovi (get app ) - Nokia's answer to Apple's challenger, a serious competitor from the volume king of the smartphone market
• GetJar (get app ) - the plucky outsider from Lithuania proving that you don't have to be a major brand to be a success in driving application downloads

My experiment so far has been simple - I've been offering a free application for live audience interaction and voting (if you are interested in having your content or event featured in the app then contact me directly)

All applications have been available with the same promotional message and content - which is english language only at the moment, and UK focussed as the UK is the launch market, but the application is available globally for those interested in UK content outside of the UK.

So, what are initial results after the first week of being offered for sale?

1. Ovi Store (2935 downloads)
2. Apple's App Store (218 downloads)
3. GetJar (217 downloads)

What is impressive here is the scale by which Ovi beats Apple and GetJar. It's over 10 times the number of downloads in the first week.

Let's look a little deeper at this and understand what countries the downloads are coming from:

Leading country by application store

1. Ovi Store - India (13% of downloads)
2. Apple - USA (78% of downloads)
3. GetJar (report not available)

Apple's App Store is dominated by US downloads - while Ovi is much more evenly spread - in fact on Ovi the application has been downloaded by consumers in 127 different countries, while on Apple's App Store it has been downloaded in just 19 different countries.

Another surprise from the Ovi statistics is different handset models that are being used. Live Talkback is offered on 3 different form factors of handset - QVGA Portrait devices - the traditional "candybar" type QVGA smartphones. QVGA Landscape devices - the email focussed enterprise devices mostly, and the new touch devices - the 5800, N97 and 5530 devices.

The QVGA Portrait devices so far have proven to be the most popular with 55% of downloads, the second most popular are the touch devices - with 34% of downloads.

There is a wake up call for iPhone developers here - if you are looking for downloads outside of the USA, developing for Nokia devices and using Ovi Store could be, based on the results so far 5x more successful than an iPhone focussed strategy.

Comments

[Bill Perry]

Thanks for sharing Matt. Will be interesting to see the results after 1 month. Also could you add the URLs to the app for each of the stores?

[Matt]

Bill - me too, though I'll be starting my own marketing activities to promote the app, so this may skew the results.

I've added links to the app in each of the app stores.

[Mehdi]

Interesting. I didn't expect Ovi to lead by such a margin. I wouldn't jump to conclusions just now though or start calling this a call to iPhone developers.

Given the large number of new apps published on the Apple App Store every day and the huge number of apps already in the store, a new app, even free, without promotion has very little chance to get noticed. The low volume of new and total apps on the Ovi Store on the other hand give you a better chance to get you app noticed. Let's see what the numbers look like in a few months after marketing.

The main "problem" here however is that your app is free. A successful free app is good for your portfolio but it doesn't pay the bills. You can build a sound business model around a free app but that's much harder than just getting paid for your app directly, which is what most developers will go for. I'd be curious to see the results of that same experiment with a commercial app.

[Matt Millar]

I was surprised too.

The volume of applications on the App Store is indeed part of the problem - the challenge for developers is in marketing an application. If Ovi continues to be a success it's likely to face similar problems. The challenge for developers, and the opportunity in the mobile application market is in how to effectively market applications to consumers - independent of what store they are retailed though.

Fortunately for me it's not a "problem" that my app is free. Live Talkback makes it's money from selling a service to media companies and event organisers, who can use reach to engage their audiences better - it's not designed to be monetized by direct application sales to consumers.

I too am curious to try the same experiment with a commercial application - and I have a couple of projects that could lead to a real experiment similar to this for a paid application.

The reality today is - if you are planning to launch a free to consumer application, you are better to do that on Ovi than the Apple App Store if you have to pick one - though I recommend doing both, as I have done.

[Yash Maheshwari]

I would say the reason for this could very well be the presence of quality free apps in the App. Store, along with the huge number of apps in there. Getting your app noticed by the users would be a difficult factor with the App. Store.

Where as with Ovi Store, as the number of apps available are less, along with an even smaller quantity of free apps, any free app is bound to get noticed.

But then that would be just one of the plausible reasons. The number of users using the Ovi Store vs the App Store would also be making a huge difference.

[Kieran]

thanks for posting, the sheer scale of Nokianomics is always interesting!