To: XX Software Development Company Manager
From: Gloria Chen
Date: 12/08/2019
RE: iOS Mobile App Store Market Analysis
Introduction
In 2017, the number of apps in the iOS App Store has grown to 7200. In this huge market, it’s essential to understand the current market when the app is ready to be published on the App Store. To attract more people to download the app, we need to make sure users can easily find our app, and understand the user preference. App Store analytics is a great way to come up with a strategy to raise the growth and retention of future customers. Therefore, I extracted a sample data with 7,197 observations from the App Store in 2017, which included the name of the app, total review count, user rating, price, the number of language support, and so on. According to the App Store data, some compelling results are highlighted as shown below:
Top 5 apps based on total review count are Facebook, Instagram, Clash of Clans, Temple Run, and Pandora - Music & Radio.
Almost 60% of Apps are rated between 4 and 4.5.
More than 50% of Apps market share are in Games genre and follow by Entertainment, Education, and Photo & Video.
56% of Apps are free in the market, but overall the paid apps have better user ratings than free apps.
The top frequent words that are used as app name are “game”, “pro”, “full”, “free”, and “simulator”.
Finding 1 - Do paid apps have better performance in iOS App Store market?
When an app is ready to release to the market, the most important thing is to define how it brings profit. Therefore, I did an analysis to make a deep insight into comparison for paid apps and free apps. By this data, two ways are utilized to determine if paid apps have better performance. First, I used the total reviews count to multiply the average user rating as a standard of popularity, and only focus on the top four market share genres. The result as shown below. Not surprisingly, it represents that the free apps generally have a higher median of popularity number than the paid apps have among all the genres. I assumed that all the reviews are rated by the users who have already download the app. As a result, free apps could bring more downloads than paid apps do.
Second, however, do those apps really can retain the users, and bring more users by releasing a new version of apps? In the following grapg, I used that data of total reviews count for the current version and past version to do the comparison. The result of the growth rate comparison between them is shown below.
Surprisingly, except Games and Other genres, paid apps have a higher growth rate on total reviews count. It means that the current version, those genres of paid apps could bring more users to download and rate the apps than free apps do. This result would be a good sign, because the apps are needed to pay, which can bring more revenue for the app company. Nevertheless, the apps of Games genre are having the opposite situation. The growth rate of free apps is better than paid apps. Therefore, I would suggest if the company wants to develop the app on this genre, it’s better to develop a free app for users to download first, then bring more profit by using other approaches such as advertising or in-app purchase.
Finding 2 - What’s the most frequent keywords for app names?
According to research information, over 65% of apps are downloaded directly after a search in the App Store (and general browsing), which indicates the importance of choosing a proper name and optimizing discoverability. To improve the app’s visibility, I provided a chart to show the high-frequency words that are used as app names in the App Store market as shown below.
Through this wordcloud we can easily see the frequent keywords. App Store algorithm pays great attention to the conversion rates. It’s better not to use the keywords that have low relevance to the genre with your app as the word has difficulty to drive more downloads. In the following, I provided a high-frequency keywords list by different genres.
I would suggest using these high-frequency words as your app name and make it appropriate to match the App Store algorithm so that the user can easily search the app in the App store. It’s also important to analyze which keywords your competitors are using.
Conclusion
There are many approaches to understanding the market. It’s always good to know your own product and find out the target market. Base on different genres of apps, you need to decide the right price strategy. It’s also important to choose the appropriate keywords as the app name. I hope this analysis can support product development team and marketing team to do better decision-making, and determine which way can maximize the potential to outrank the competitors.
I would like to discuss the analysis further if there is anything not clear or needs to be elaborated more. Please do not hesitate to contact us through my information: ychen@seattleu.edu. Thank you!
Best regards,
Gloria Chen