With 27 apps per device, iPhone customers are likely to stay loyal

Seth Weintraub
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April 25, 2009
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I did a little 4th grade math over at Computerworld this morning.  If Apple has distributed a billion applications and sold 37 million iPhones and iPod touches, that means that each device has an average of 27 apps.  Knowing people who haven't installed any apps, as well as some who've filled their device up, there is a wide variance.  But what it does mean is that iPhone and iPod touch have a stickiness to them that might prove stickier that the original iPod platform with its AAC files.  Read more at Computerworld.

 

Comments (8)

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | April 25, 2009 - 8:42am

I believe your stickiness point remains valid. but your math may not consider that many of the 1 Billion d/loads are UPGRADES.
Go AAPL!

admin | April 25, 2009 - 8:46am

They wouldn't get credit for that.  If they are counting upgrades = shady

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | April 26, 2009 - 1:32pm

/facepalm

Never forget the inevitable. Apple doesn't need any CEO to keep that distortion field going.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | April 25, 2009 - 9:17am

You also have to take into account that that 1 downloaded app can be put on lets say my iPhone, my mothers iPhone, and my dads iPod touch. That still counts as 1 app. And I have 231 apps in my iTunes library.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | April 26, 2009 - 6:31am

I don't think that Apple is just going to assume that the sales from the App store is enough to keep on top of the world. Imagine if another platform emerges where all the apps are free, and which is easier to program for, and has some kick-ass hardware features that the iPhone just doesn't have?

Apple has been very aggressive in the iPod space. Remember our shock when they completely replaced the extremely popular Mini, and then they replaced the 1st, and then 2nd, and then 3rd generation Nano? Apple designers simply did not rest. They could have milked each of their old designs for several years - like the old Scully-run Apple did with the Mac Classic and MacOS 7.

I think Apple is, once again, in push-the-envelope mode. It is unlikely that they'll make a bunch of products to fill every niche - instead, they'll make substantial improvements to the iPhone... infuriating the competition.

The tricker part now is that they need to retail some guise of backward compatibility with the apps built and sold on the App store. But they can do that - they've make huge strides in backwards compatibility with the Mac OS X.

I imagine Apple taking the iPhone to an entirely new level. The core platform design is now likely something like 3 years old. Maybe it'll be a whole new design, but perhaps the major changes will be under the skin.

I do not expect the big new thing to be a front-facing video camera or 5 MP camera with sapphire lens. I expect Apple to keep shocking the industry forward with something unexpectedly new. The competition should say "Wow, we're 3 years behind... again".

Joe (not verified) | April 26, 2009 - 11:32am

I've got more than 200 apps in my library. I stopped buying new apps after all the screens on my iPhone were filled up. It's a hassle to arrange the icons on the screens... Apple should let us organize the apps inside iTunes:
like the playlists for music, there should be folders for the apps. (a maximum of 9 folders, one for each screen -- and then a maxium of 9 subfolders per parent directory...) Dragging apps in iTunes to the different folders would move them the right screen...

My name is N (not verified) | April 26, 2009 - 1:30pm

Categories.
Oh yeah, and pwn. It's worth it.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | April 27, 2009 - 3:59pm

Bad conclusion... obviously that 1 billion includes application updates, and people do not keep every app they download. Perhaps the average person has downloaded an average of 25-so apps, they could very likely only have kept 15 or 20.