Recent figures published by Sensor Tower show that, like the internet (or the world in general), app stores they have also become a field dominated by a small number of privileged ones, while crowds of smaller / independent developers are fighting for a space that is in the increasingly competitive market.
Considering data from App Store It’s from Google Play for the third quarter of this year, the firm detected that 80% of downloads / purchases made in stores in the period were applications produced by 1% of developers. Putting that in numbers, the “elite” of app stores generated 23.6 billion downloads, while the other 99% generated 6 billion – an average of 7,650 downloads per developer.
As Dave Mark, from The Loop, that number represents an average of 2,550 downloads per developer, per month – making life very difficult for most people working with the App Store or Google Play. It is worth noting that the 7,650 downloads in the quarter represent 0.001% numbers generated in the same period by just one developer: the Facebook.
It gets even more acute when it comes to revenue, rather than the number of downloads. The elite of app stores spawned $ 20.5 billion last quarter (or 93% of the total), while the remaining 99% of developers generated $ 1.5 billion – an average of $ 9,900 per developer over the period.
Focusing only on the category of games, the concentration is even greater: 1% generated 82% of downloads (9.1 billion) and 95% of revenue (US $ 16.3 billion). It is worth noting, in fact, that none of this is one: revenue and number of downloads have been concentrated in this elite of developers for at least five years, with occasional fluctuations in rates here and there, as shown in the graph below:
That is, it is that story: get rich or die trying. Including the App Store.
