Some new figures regarding apps in Apple’s App Store were released today by Gene Munster, Wall Street analyst with Piper Jaffray, indicating that roughly 81% are free, while the top 50 paid applications have an average selling price of $1.49.
Munster forecasts the average iOS app price to increase as developers start favoring the iPad, which currently carriers a higher average app price of $4.66. These higher prices indicate why development may start to skew to those tailored for the iPad, as developers earn more on their cut.
These numbers suggest that iPhone, iPod touch and iPad users download over 16.6 million applications every day, which is nearly double the 8.9 million daily download rate of music on iTunes. In total, Munster forecasts that Apple receives roughly 29 cents for every application downloaded, which implies the App Store has a gross margin of 44 percent, and has earned Apple roughly $428 million in revenue since the launch of the App Store. This falls in line with Steve Job’s announcement during WWDC that his company has paid over $1B to iOS developers.
After all expenses, Apple has earned roughly $189 million in gross profit on paid apps alone since the beginning of the App Store, which is no small feat, but amounts to just 1 percent of the $33.7 billion in gross profit Apple has earned since the App Store launched. “Over the same time period, the iTunes store has generated $3.6b in revenue, to which the App Store has contributed $429m, or 12%,” Munster explained.
