The App Store as grown at incredible rate since its inception, yet while the exponential growth is well-documented within the mobile industry, even the activity of the past twelve months is of incredible interest. There are few more entertaining ways of viewing statistics than the colorful illustration of the infographic, and Appsfire has duly provided with an easy-to-digest round-up of the year’s App Store activity. Here, we assess their findings.
A mammoth 340,000 apps have been created and published to the App Store this year – up from 306,000 last year, and of that 340,000, two-thirds were free.
Since the beginning of the App Store, 1,025,000 apps have been created. Of those, however, only around ten per cent managed to gain a reasonable amount of traction. A quarter of that number (273,000) have been retired, while 640,000 have simply floated around.
Unsurprisingly, Angry Birds dominates the gaming section once again. Rovio Entertainment’s juggernaut franchise has gone from strength to strength over the years, and while the original title maintains the accolade of highest app score among all paid games ever, Angry Birds Space has the highest app score of paid games released this year. The space-themed title – along with the recent release of Angry Birds Star Wars – has helped Rovio maintain its position as top developer.
In terms of paid apps, the highest-scoring of any released this year was My Calendar mobile, while the top paid app full stop is, not surprisingly, WhatsApp Messenger.
Of the free releases this year, OMGPOP!’s Draw Something – a title which seems to have faded a tad in recent months despite initial buzz – has the highest score of any free game released this year, while Google’s long-awaited Maps claims top spot in the free apps of 2012 section. Apple made a royal mess of its iOS 6 Maps app, and after a couple of months of limbo, last week’s release has taken the App Store by storm.
Temple Run – a title which gripped mobile gamers throughout last year – has the highest score of all free games, while Pinterest is the top app among the App Store’s freebies.
Rovio is the undisputed king of the App Store, and with five Angry Birds titles (and a couple of others, too), I wouldn’t be surprised if the company outdoes itself once again next year.
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