Currently, the App Store ecosystem is not friendly to indie developers. According to data released by Sensor Tower, the top 1% of applications in the world account for 80% of the total downloads of 29.6 billion in the third quarter of 2019. This means that the rest of the developers are sharing the remaining 20% 6 billion downloads.
The average number of downloads per quarter by 99% of developers and 784,080 users is 7,650. This is less than a thousandth of Facebook’s 682 million downloads during the quarter. Of course, this data is not so surprising. After all, social platforms like Facebook and YouTube already have more than 1 billion users. However, considering the fact that the number of apps released in the market continues to increase and competition is intensifying, we can see how difficult it is for new apps.
According to the report, in 2018, there were 3.4 million apps released on the Apple App Store and Google Play. This is a 65% increase from 2.2 million in 2014. However, among them, the number of apps downloaded more than 1,000 times decreased from 30% to 26% over the same period.
Looking at games alone, 1,080 companies out of 108,000 developers accounted for 9.1 billion times, or 82%, out of the total 11 billion games. It averages over 8.4 million times per site. The remaining 18%, 2 billion downloads, was divided by 106,920 developers. This is an average of 18,000 downloads per location.
Looking at the amount of sales, the gap is widening. Of the total sales of $22 billion in the quarter, $205 is generated by 1,526 developers. The remaining $1.5 billion was divided by 151056 companies and sold an average of $9,990. In terms of game sales alone, the top 1% and 445 developers generated 95% of the total, and $15.5 billion, and the remaining $800 million was divided by 44,000, or 99%. It is equivalent to an average of $18,100 in one place.
This trend is not new. The top 1% share has not changed significantly over the past few years, neither in number of installations nor in sales. In other words, the majority of developers are stealing a few new users and new installations from each other. Related information can be found here .