So you've got a million dollar iPhone app idea... | Hacker News Reader

So you've got a million dollar iPhone app idea...

blog.jwegener.com

107 pointsbdotdub10 comments

He claims " 54% of the 45M devices are in the US which means ~ 25M devices. The US has about 300M people. That means about 8% of the general American population has one of these devices."

However, this doesn't take in account broken phones or people upgrading iphones (and then not cycling the old phone back into the market place).

I would guess this number is 30% higher than it should be, at least.

Thanks for the comments on my blog post guys. This 45M isn't the # of devices produced. It's Apple's own number about the install base of app world. So likely it takes into consideration broken phones and people upgrading.

-Jonathan

I agree. I also believe that more devices are outside the U.S.

if i could upvote this twice, I would.

found this post really useful. 3% of iPhone owners bought the most popular app.

Actually I would love to see usage patterns among the free apps. Do people download a lot of free apps and use them, download a lot but delete after a day, or do people just download 1-3 free apps relevant to their interests (usually a better weather app, AIM, and Facebook) and not really "browse" the full gamut of the App Store?

Because I would not be surprised to find that only 25% of iPod/iPhone actually use the App Store beyond the above simple apps.

There's a lot of data about this if you google a bit. One of them is this: http://www.pinchmedia.com/appstore-secrets/

It mentions that only 30% of the users use a free app after the first day, and more stuff like that.

"So you've got a million dollar iPhone app idea...?"

Think before implement. Apple might reject you.

Where does he get the 45 mil iPhones/iPod Touch number from? The linked earnings call broke the numbers down as:

iPhone units: 5.2 million iPod units: 10.2 million

I don't see the iPod touch vs "traditional" iPod breakdown anywhere.

(Also, people outside the US do buy apps!)

Glad you liked my post! For the 45M figure, scroll down to 5:41 (or alternatively search the earnings call page for "App store in 77 countries, more than 45 million install base.")

Apple doesn't break out iPod Touch vs Traditional. So I used admob's numbers about the iTouch vs iPhone to arrive at the number of iPod Touch devices.

Yes, people outside the US buy apps :-P But it's useful to get a device penetration figure (8% of americans) and work with that to do market sizing for a vertical. You could obviously figure out the penetration figure broken down by each country, but that would be rather time consuming.

-Jonathan

thanks for the good information

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