Gartner on Apples Share of Mobile App Sales

post from Daring Fireball on 18 January 2010 11:51:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Chris Foresman, on a new report from Gartner on mobile app sales:

Earlier this month, Apple announced that sales had topped 3 billion; that means iPhone users downloaded 2.5 billion apps in 2009 alone. Gartner’s figures show another 16 million apps that could come from other platform’s recently opened app stores, giving Apple at least 99.4 percent of all mobile apps sold for the year.

Foresman is wrong here. Apple didn’t announce 3 billion App Store sales; they announced 3 billion downloads, including free apps. Apple has never (to my knowledge) publicly revealed the breakdown between free and paid app downloads from the App Store.

However, if Gartner is correct that all other platforms combined accounted for only 16 million mobile app sales last year, then Apple’s share of the market is astonishingly high. It’s not 99.4 percent, as Foresman indicates, but still crazy-ass high.

?

Read The Full Article:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app
-sales-in-2009.ars