I shared this on Hondune's thread regarding their game "Down to Zero", but I thought it might be of some interest to developers. The New York Times had an article regarding a survey by AdMob which collected data on how iPhone users found new apps to purchase - http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/08/11/11readwriteweb-how-do-iphone-users-find-new-apps-82184.html Ah, the importance of visibility!
Great info, thanks for sharing this. 60% looking through top lists - that's huge, and now that I think about it, that's how I find most of the apps I purchase too.
Overall, AdMob received 190 responses from these ads, which the company feels is a significant sample size and provides a representative sample of the larger iPhone app market. A billion downloads and 190 replies is significant? Who does their maths?
Well, the sample is of iPhone users, not application downloads, so we are looking at tens of millions, but not at a billion, and, it is true, that you get a surprising degree of accuracy from a relatively small sample size, although this study does use a voluntary, rather than a random sample to find its users, so there are some questions about the data. Still, this might be about as good as one can expect at the moment, and it does seem to confirm my general anecdotal experience.
I bet if there was a poll here you would get different results. Most of the apps I purchase I find from appshopper or on the forums here. Come to think of it a majority of the apps I get I first read about on forums for App Store and Cydia. I rarely check the top 100 lists anymore as it mostly is a popularity and cheapest app contest.
True...but before you discovered these forums how did you find apps? Before I knew about TA, I only bought from the top lists....usually from the top 25 paid if something looked interesting, but otherwise one of the top lists for a particular category. Then I discovered AppSniper and I started buying based on price drops...that was a great/horrible period. I accumulated so many apps, and spent way too much money....combination of sales and impulse purchasing was not very good for my wallet, lol. Once I found out about Touch Arcade, I spent way less, but the apps that I bought were always high quality since it went through a sort of filter. My point here is that the majority of the people buying apps don't use or even know about forums like TA. I'm willing to bet that they still use the top lists to make app purchases. That would definitely explain the disparity between the download numbers between top 10, top 25, top 50, top 100, etc. Visibility is a huge factor with the AppStore distribution model.
Absolutely correct. The average iPhone/touch owner only looks at the ranked lists on the device. The income drop when you fall off a particular level is staggering.
Statisticians who know more math than you do. 190 is a sufficient size for a sample. The thing is, this is a voluntary response survey, which can skew the results in unforeseen ways.
