Medialets

Here we are a little over a week since the launch of the first Android-powered phone, the G1. As of Monday, Android Market has been open to developers to distribute their applications as they wish. We’ve made some more observations on how the Android Market is evolving, and we’re eager to share them with you. 

Highlights

(1) 167 Apps have been downloaded between between 667,000 and 2.9 Million times.

(2) Downloads are being driven by 41 apps, which account for between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads.

(3) Two applications, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather channel generated the most downloads (50,000 - 250,000).

(4) Although download ranges can be very large, growth on the low-end was still nearly 80% during the first week.

(5) 5 Categories account for 61% of all apps.

(6) The number of apps has nearly tripled since launch, led by the Games, Tools and Productivity categories.

Applications By Category

Android Market applications totaled 167 as of 10/29.  The top 5 Categories with the most apps accounted for 61% of all titles: Tools, Games, Lifestyle, Multimedia, and Productivity.

Title growth has nearly tripled since launch, as the chart below shows.  Three categories - Tools, Games and Productivity led the growth, representing just over 50% of the 105 apps added since last week.

Downloads

Android Market provides download data in ranges or “bins.”  While it’s better than having no information at all (e.g. Apple’s App Store) it gets a bit unwieldy within the top 2 bins, 10,000 - 50,000, and 50,000 - 250,000, where the top end is 5x larger than the bottom end, and the variance can be up to 200,000.  In the chart above, we’ve looked at the trend of total downloads from both ends of the ranges given, and growth seems pretty healthy on both ends.  Apps downloaded from the end of the Market’s first day until 10/29 grew at a rate anywhere between 80% on the low end to potentially 97% on the upside.

The table below gives detail on the distribution of downloads, which are driven by 41 apps in the two highest bins. Taking the low/high ranges into consideration, these 41 apps comprise anywhere between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads

Within these 41 apps, two of them, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather Channel generated the highest number of downloads (50,000 - 250,000).  The remaining 39 are in the 10,000 - 50,000 range - we displayed the “Top 5″ in the table below, which were determined by  the most recent average of user ratings.  

We’ll keep you posted as data continues to roll in.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear your comments and ideas as our ecosystem continues to evolve.  Reach out to us at connect at medialets dot com and add us on Twitter at @medialets.

Google’s Android Market has been officially live for 24 hours. Here are some early observations and comparisons with the iPhone App Store’s first 24 hours.

There are myriad similarities between iPhone and Android users:

• They like to play games, shop, and know what music they are listening to,
• They are curious about the weather, and
• They generally share the same interests as iPhone users 

During the first 24 hours of Android Market, 62 apps were available to consumers, all free.  This is less than 10% of the number of apps we saw at the launch of Apple’s App Store. Although Apple allowed both free and paid applications to be distributed when the App Store launched, paid downloads for Android will not be available until Q1 2009.

Observation #1 - The average application has 7,800+ downloads.

Android Market is providing some detail on downloads per application -  in contrast to Apple’s embargo of this information after the first 15 hours of launching their App Store.  Rather than displaying exact figures, Android phones show download ranges for a given application, with the smallest range we observed being 100-500 and the largest 10,000-50,000. Given those ranges, roughly 206,000 to 770,000 downloads occurred within the first 24 hours of launch. The weighted average of midpoints is 7,850 downloads/app, just north of the middle of the 5,000 - 10,000 range.

Observation #2  - Nine apps made it to the 10,000 - 50,000 downloads range.

If we use ratings and number of reviews to differentiate, unlike the iPhone platform, games are not in the top three.  Of the nine apps in this range, only three are games.  ShopSavvy is at the top of the list factoring in ratings and number of reviews, followed by The Weather Channel, and Shazam, an app that helps people identify a song they are listening to.  During the early hours of the iPhone App Store, while Apple was still publishing download data, only two apps broke the 10,000 download mark - Remote and AIM.  Remote, the leading app, was downloaded ~16,000 times. Although the ranges for the top Android apps are similar, it is still too early  to assert with confidence that a trajectory similar to Apple’s App Store is occurring.  Other factors over time need to be considered, including the total number of apps in the market.

Observation #3 - 24 hours into the launch, it appears that either Android users are generally interested in the same types of application functionality as iPhone users, or possibly, that Android developers are generally interested in creating the same types of apps as iPhone developers.

We compared our observations of the iPhone App Store 24 hours after launch with Android Market, and found that once we normalized the names of categories between the two platforms, the categories have similar distributions of applications. We had to make some assumptions and groupings to make our best apples-to-androids comparison and noted those in the table below the chart.

As always, we love hearing from anyone who is interested in learning more about, or sharing their experiences about this new platform. Feel free to contact us at connect at www.medialets.com or follow us on twitter at @medialets.

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research last week published some interesting statistics on the sale of the first 1 Million 3G iPhones.  We took a quick look and made some observations.

It’s a typical power curve, with 4 of the 22 countries capturing 81% of unit sales. The US leads with 600,000 units sold followed by Japan, Germany and France each with about 70,000 units.  

If you look at the percentage of each carrier’s contract subscriber base in each country, with the exception of the US, it looks as if all countries have a very consistent penetration rate of ~ 0.4% except Canada, whose anemic penetration rate and units sold are most likely a result of the systems issues that Apple and many carriers were having during registration of the handsets.

From a global carrier perspective, removing AT&T from the pack, it looks like T-Mobile is the leader for overseas unit sales, reporting 89,000 units sold in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Orange is next with combined unit sales of 77,000 from France, Belgium and Switzerland. Japan’s Softbank is third with 70,000 units sold.

Of course this data only spans the very frothy first three days.  We are looking forward to learning more about results over the last 2+ weeks and will keep you posted as more data comes in.  Let us know if you hear anything else, and a big thanks to our developer community for continuing to keep the quest for transparency a top commercial priority.

Earlier today I put it out there for anyone motivated enough to calculate it using some of the volume data that Apple published earlier today.

It’s been on my mind all day (which people have told me says something…I guess) so I went ahead and did it.  But there is a “health warning” regarding the consumption of this information.  Its not revenue - its really a price * volume proxy - lots of assumptions, but again, done in the spirit of transparency.

We start with our earlier premise that in the absence of download volume, we would use the number of reviews written for an app as a proxy for relative volume comparisons.  As of 7/13, written reviews for paid-for apps outnumbered those for free apps by about 25% (that’s about a 55/45 ratio). So:

If there were 10 Million downloads, then using the ratio above, we’re left with about  4,450,000 for paid-for apps.

Next, we know that there were 2,623 reviews written for paid-for apps. Dividing this into the number of reviews that an app received gives us the “share” of reviews for an app - which translates to our proxy for share of volume.  Multiply this by 4,450,000, and again by the price to get an estimate of relative financial position vs. other apps (I don’t feel it’s qualified enough to be called revenue yet).

So, if Super Monkey Ball has 290 reviews, the following happens:

290 = 11.1% of paid-for reviews.  11.1% * 4,450,000 * $9.99 = $4.9M.

There, I did it.

But remember, this is not revenue!  It’s a way to gain more insight into how pricing and demand affect the relative financial performance of an app.  Here is a table of a few I’ve done for you.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this.

A boss once told me that launching a business is a lot like Indy car racing – with no sleep of course. Aside from a roar at the start, there are also a lot of crashes and mechanicals – (see where I’m going with this). The thing is, when there’s a big cloud of smoke ahead, you have to have the resolve to trust your team, your dashboard and your telemetry, grip tight, and drive through it.

Did I make any money?

That’s the question on everyone’s mind. How did my app perform? How has it done vs. others overall? In my category? How about with others of the same price or vs. free apps? What’s the big picture?
We’ve been gathering and crunching away at data all weekend long, and here are some of our observations and analysis.

Yes. It’s behaving like a market.

Prices are falling as more apps are added. We learn in Econ 101 that as more competitors enter a market, the more likely we are to see price compression for an unlimited resource. We’ve been reviewing the App Store more or less hourly since it became available on-line, and (barring some ‘mechanicals’ from Apple), the trend over time seems to indicate that this may already be happening (Chart 1). I say “may” only because these are app owners’ initial bids into the market – we have not seen much activity in terms of price changes yet, but are less than 100 hours into it.

Is a proliferation of free apps driving this pattern? Chart 2 indicates that it isn’t. In fact it is a very similar pattern.

Competition can be “ugly.”

If you’re not the lead dog, the scenery never changes. People are taking advantage of weak points in the App Store process to get noticed. You will see the same behaviors if you look in the Yellow Pages. Here are the top 10 app names in alphabetical order as of around 7pm last night:

• !! Solitaire City !!
• !FLOverload!
• “CubicMan Deluxe”
• “Whack The Groundhog”
• “Jam’
• “Jirbo Break’
• “Jirbo Jive’
• “Jive’
• “Marble Mash’
• “Paper Football’

Strong desire for transparency.

How much money did I make yesterday/to date, etc.? For a while, the App store was publishing number of downloads, so you could directly see the performance of your application. If you were scrappy enough, you could benchmark vs. other apps. Which we did. Until Apple shut the counter down after about 15 hours. I can’t blame them. Where I come from, publishing real-time revenue for a publicly traded company leads to unemployment. However, now that Im on the other side, like many others, I’m pushing for price transparency – I want to see where the market is going.

The next best thing, we think, is to measure download activity by proxy using number of reviews posted. It does not give us insight to revenue, but it may be able to give us relative perspective on volume as a benchmark. The thinking is that the more an app gets downloaded, the more likely people will post reviews. I’ll let you figure out the math to interpret this vs. the 10 Million downloads Apple reported this morning. In the meantime, here’s a snapshot of one of our leaderboard tables that we have started publishing and updating 4 times a day (and boy are our fingers tired!).

Free is “Better”

At least that’s what the stats coming out of the first 3 full days of operations are saying. Using our volume proxy of reviews submitted, Chart 4 shows that free apps generate anywhere from 24% – 29% more reviews than paid-for apps do.

The obvious follow-up question is “OK, but are they of similar quality as paid-for apps?” We tested this, and were actually surprised to see that the average rating (on a 5 point scale) was higher for free apps (Chart 5).

It’s Your Market, Too

To carry on the racing analogy, we haven’t even reached the first turn, and there already are some smoke patches to drive through. At Medialets, besides providing specific metrics for our application development partners, we are trying to help the market become more efficient in general. We’d love to get your thoughts on some of the data we are publishing. Let us know how we can make this better or other ways you might like to understand the changes in this market and we’ll get our pit crew right on it!