In one sentence: We might never know.
ZDnet blogger Jason O’Grady claimed in a blog entry yesterday that the only way Apple could have reached 1.5 billion downloads was by “cooking the books”: They would be by counting all the updates and reloads, power-users sucking up apps, aso.
Even more: Jason bets “that two-thirds -or a full billion- are updates or re-downloads”.
Let’s assume for a second that Jason is right. Here’s what the math looks like:
How many iPhones and iPod Touches are out there today? iPhones: 4 million shipped in 2007, 13.6 million sold in 2008 and 2.2 million during the first 3 months of 2009. For April to June, Apple has not reported yet, so let’s assume 3 million (this might be low, since they sold 1 million iPhones in the week after the launch of the iPhone 3GS alone). That makes 22.8m iPhones. Let’s subtract 50% for upgrades, replacements and non-activated 1st generation phones (3.7m) and 20% for iPhone 3G (2.8m phones) and then add another 4 million iPod Touch (I don’t have actual numbers for the iTouch). That makes 20.3 million iPhones. Heck, for the sake of easy math, let’s round it down to 20 million.
So 500 million apps divided by 20 million devices equals 25 apps per devices. I’m not a big apps collector, but even I have close to 60 apps that I downloaded (although not all are on my iPhone any longer). Many people I know download apps whenever they learn about them from their friends (word-of-mouth drives a lot of apps downloads) – it is literally an “on-the-go” decision to grab apps. So 25 apps per device simply feels too low to me.
If Jason is wrong and all 1.5b apps are regular downloads, that’s 75 apps per active iPhone. This number seems more plausible to me than 25.
Jason is right in one regard, though. Apple should tell us how they count. Although I will doubt they will. One of the best signs that a Marketing campaign works is if the competition accuses you of of unfair math or claims. So Apple will sit this out. And we will never know.
Did you enjoy this article? Please subscribe to iPhonePhotoVideo to receive all the updates on time and for free!
Related posts:
Comments on this entry are closed.