Thanks to a link on Gizmodo, I just learned of a new company called Busted Loop run by Josh Kastelein and Dan Bachelder in Maine. It's not exactly clear to me what Busted Loop plans to do; Kastelein's LinkedIn page says that Busted Loop, LLC was founded in June of 2009 "to create innovative solutions targeting emerging software markets" and the company's website says: "At Busted Loop we make things out of information. We invent new
uses for data as a reflex, and materialize those ideas every single
day. It's what we do for fun and profit." Well that clears it up.
The one currently visible portion of the new company is the company's blog, and the last ten posts or so have included some interesting data and conclusions about iPhone apps. For example:
- As of July 7, 2009, there were 55,977 apps in the App Store, the largest category of which is games at between 10,000 and 13,000.
- Only a small minority of iPhone apps are free, around 12,000 of them, but a large majority of the most popular apps are free. No real surprise there since many of us download lots of free apps just to see what they are about, but we don't download a paid app unless we think we might really want it.
- "Most paid apps fail," selling just a few or no copies. This is an interesting counterpoint to the stories you sometimes see in the media about a few lucky iPhone app developers making buckets of money. There are a whole lot of app developers who barely see a dime.
- The most expensive apps in the App Store tend to be medical apps.
- If you want to buy every single app in the app store, it would cost you about $144,326.00, an average of $2.59 per app (or an average of $3.34 an app if you don't include the 12,538 free apps).
- Look at the chart on this page and you can see which app developers would make the most money if you bought every single app. Some developers are near the top because they have a ton of apps. Brighthouse Labs has around 1,600 apps on the app store for about $0.99 a piece. On the other extreme, Lextech Labs has only four apps, but iRa Pro (a surveillance camera app that I discussed here) is one of the most expensive at $899.99 and iRa Direct is $499.99.
Thanks to the guys at Busted Loop for these interesting numbers. Hopefully the product that they are working on is as interesting as their analysis of the data from the App Store.
