Who exactly is using iPhone apps?

Unfortunately for Apple and all the developers, 70 per cent of users stop using applications downloaded from App Store after one day

One day, an application developer died and was shown both hell and heaven. In hell, people were tied to chairs and whipped with red hot iron rods while they wrote programs. The same was also happening in heaven. When the application developer asked what the difference between hell and heaven was, one of the devils paused his sadistic task of hitting a poor screaming programmer and said, 'In heaven your program gets used'.

Most people writing applications for Apple's App Store for use with the iPhone may wonder where they will go after they die, but people from Pinch Media, which analysed over 30 million downloads from Apple's App Store, will tell you that, if there is any truth in the above joke, then most of them will be going to hell.

No killer apps

According to a presentation by Greg Yardley, cofounder and CEO of Pinch Media, only 30 per cent of people who buy an iPhone application actually use it the day after it was purchasedu2014in other words, the remaining 70 per cent of the people don't use the said applications. Even worse, Pinch Media found that the numbers go into a free fall from the first day onwards, and 20 days after downloading an application, less than 5 per cent of the users use it.

This is extremely bad news for people who are writing applications for App Store, but some people have seen it coming. Way back in August 2008, Erick Schonfeld wrote in techcrunch.com that, one month and 60 million downloads later, there was not even one single killer app for the iPhone. Wikipedia says that on January 16, 2009, Apple announced on its website that 500 million applications had been downloaded. But from figures released by Pinch Media, it is clear that these applications get downloaded, but they don't get used that much.

Guidelines needed

So we have to ask a question that is quite ugly in a recession yearu2014what about profitability? PiperJaffray, a US middle-market investment banking firm, had said that App Store could create a profitable marketplace with revenue exceeding $1 billion annually for Apple, and this is quite possible because Apple gets 30 per cent of the revenue of all apps downloaded. In fact, spurred by the success of Apple's App Store, telecom industry leaders like Nokia, China Mobile and Microsoft recently announced online software stores to find new sources of revenue. But if the success of the App Store is only based on downloads and not use, then it may well not stand up to the test of timeu2014and this implies that the entire industry could suffer.

All this may mean that Apple may need new guidelines for applications. Right now, it has various rules for instance, applications must not duplicate the functions of the iPhone itself but these are for Apple's convenience. Maybe, Apple should look at coming up with rules that will ensure that applications have a high amount of usability.

QUICK TAKE
>>Users are downloading from App Store, but not using them
>>Apple may need to look at ways of creating better applications
>>If there is no killer app from the App Store, then this may not be feasible in the long run