Comments on: The average iPhone app sells 25,000 units

By: Jan

Jan — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:52:00 +0000

my app has only 150 free downloads for last 3 days and only one paid

By: battery

battery — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:46:00 +0000

I can not express my feeling now,just can say i like you

By: micha

micha — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:19:48 +0000

using
f(k;s,N)=frac{1/k^s}{sum_{n=1}^N (1/n^s)}.

as formula
where k is rank, s=1 (exponent of inverse relation), N=total num of applications

By: micha

micha — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:17:54 +0000

thanks Luke, small update if you plug in new numbers from wikipedia you get (end of march 2010)
f(75,000,1,150,000)=3*10^9(1/75,000)/12.495 = ~3200 median download

By: Brand iPhone Apps: Benchmarks for Success « Bytes Hotdish

Brand iPhone Apps: Benchmarks for Success « Bytes Hotdish — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:23:48 +0000

[...] average number of downloads for an app is a mere 25,000. Still, this is better than Facebook apps by a fair margin, where there are a few superstar apps [...]

By: Julio Medina

Julio Medina — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:51:32 +0000

I like this info…

By: WireBear

WireBear — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:55:23 +0000

Good Article! It would also be interesting to find out how the “average” paid app does in sales.

By: WireBear

WireBear — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:55:23 +0000

Good Article! It would also be interesting to find out how the “average” paid app does in sales.

By: Luke Halliwell

Luke Halliwell — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:47:10 +0000

Um, I just did it with these 2 lines of Python

total = sum([(1.0 / r) for r in range(1, 25000)])
print 1800000000 * (1.0 / 37500) / total

I'm sure there must be some statistical software that lets non-programmers look at distributions, but I don't know of it. It's probably possible in Excel somehow too.

By: Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas Lovell — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:38:09 +0000

That's a really interesting analysis. I hadn't heard of the Zipf Law before. Where exactly do you “plug the numbers in”?