Analyst Horace Dediu, manager of research firm Asymco, wrote a report quite interesting regarding the number of applications downloaded by each iDevice since the launch of the iTunes Appstore until now. In just a few days, Apple will announce that in 2 years of activity, the iTunes AppStore has recorded over 10 billion downloads, the virtual application store growing twice as fast as the iTunes Music Store, which reached 2 billion downloads after only 10 years since launch. Considering these figures, Horace Dediu made a small calculation to see how many applications each iPhone/iPad or iPod Touch owner downloaded on average.
In 2008, after the launch of the iTunes AppStore, it is estimated that each owner of an iDevices downloads an average of 10 applications on their device. 2 years and several tens of millions of iDevices later, this figure has increased 6 times reaching 60 applications downloaded on average on each iDevice. This figure was obtained by the analyst by dividing the total number of downloads by the total number of iDevices, but of course it is not representative for everyone. There are users who have downloaded thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of applications, but there are some who have downloaded maybe only a few dozen or none, so the average end is 60 applications downloaded by each iDevice.
The amazing story of this chart is not that apps are running at above 30 million downloads per day, but that figure is growing. Growth like this is hard to get one's mind around. Not only are downloads increasing, but the rate of increase is increasing.
There is one final piece to put in place on this puzzle. Some might argue that the reason these download rates are increasing is because the installed base of devices is increasing at the same rate. In other words, app consumption could be steady on a per user basis.
Don't forget that this week the iTunes AppStore will hits 10 billion downloads and Apple offers an iTunes Gift card worth $10.000 to whoever downloads the 10 billionth app.
