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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Self-Publishing   >   Sales   >   The average iPhone app sells 25,000 units

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The average iPhone app sells 25,000 units

By on October 6, 2009

At the IBC legal conference I attended last week, I received some interesting iPhone download statistics.

The key point was that even as the number of iPhone applications has proliferated to 75,000, and over 1.8 billion apps have been downloaded, the average number of downloads per app has remained remarkably constant at around 25,000. The charts below show the story (click to see them at full size).

Number of iPhone applications and downloads

Number of applications and total number of downloads from the AppStrore Number of applications and total number of downloads from the AppStrore

The average doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s a mean, which assumes that downloads are evenly distributed. It is much more likely that some applications have a million downloads and some have almost none. A median would be more useful, but I don’t have the data for that.

Nevertheless, the trend line shows that despite the proliferation of titles on the AppStore, the average app has, consistently, had 25,000 downloads.

Which should give heart to aspiring iPhone developers the world over.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com