60% of the apps in the App Store have never been downloaded | Hacker News Reader

60% of the apps in the App Store have never been downloaded

phonearena.com

13 pointsbconway13 comments

Something is not kosher with these numbers. Anyone going through the effort of publishing an app to the App Store will at least download it themselves and have at least a few friends or family members do the same.

Pure speculation: maybe these apps are actually ebooks or some other kind of static content just packaged as an app and they are generated by an automatic or a semi-automatic process. Assuming that the article is correct, of course.

The article is not correct. The original source says these apps get 0-10 downloads per day. So they could be getting over three thousand downloads a year and still fall into the category that the article says has "never been downloaded."

Exactly - this number being stated as an "exact" one is very suspicious. "Barely ever downloaded" would give it a lot more legitimacy, but I guess only Apple could give us the real number (which I really doubt they would)

I think these numbers are based on one blog post the company made[1].

They wrote:

"[...] defined that an app has to hold a position for at least 7 days to be considered as "ranked". That was the case for 265,959 apps from the 18th of July 2012 to 25th of July 2012. To the remaining 410.023 apps off the ranks, we refer as app zombies, leading a life outside a prospering market."

and

"[...] in theory app zombies can still be downloaded, we concluded that an average zombie is getting zero to ten downloads a day, depending on the country."

[1]: http://www.apptrace.com/blog/2012-08-06/inside-zombie-land

If it's true (which I'm highly skeptical of) it should be encouraging because it means the median income that you can hope to capture is quite a bit higher than the averages people run based on totals.

Makes me feel better about my 350 downloads...

I've got a small "scratching my own itch" app with a paid and ad version on the store for 6 months, no marketing at all really other than being in an underserved (and small) niche. Paid version has had about 75 downloads, the ad version has a few thousand. By the article's definition, it's "never been downloaded". However, even at such a low download rate, it's basically paid for the cost of putting it on the store, by the end of the first year and assuming the download rate stays the same it will have made a small return.

While it's not going to replace my day job, it was still worth doing IMO.

80-20 principle working here. Not to be picky, but I think most app must've been downloaded at minimum a few times, if it's even by friends of the app builder.

This is highly unlikely and probably flat out wrong. Placing any app in the app store will result in a few immediate downloads just from being listed.

"...we concluded that an average zombie is getting zero to ten downloads a day, depending on the country."

This is not even remotely the same thing as "never been downloaded". I've flagged the article for blatant stupidity. Do people not think before they click the up arrow?

To be fair, it only has 12 points at this time.

Still enough to get it well up the front page, though.

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