More than four billion free applications have been downloaded from Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) App Store and paid for applications sell for an average price of $1.49, according to data from an analyst at Piper Jaffray.
Analyst Gene Munster released new statistics and facts related to Apple’s App Store in a research note on Wednesday. He noted that the top 50 applications have an average selling price of $1.49 and 81% of downloaded applications are free. He noted that iPad applications are more pricey than iPhone and iPod Touch applications, with an average price of $4.66 for the top 30 applications. Munster’s numbers also suggested that iOS users download more than 16.6 million applications every day, more than double the number of music downloads daily on iTunes.
Apple makes about $0.29 for every application downloaded, Musnter said. The number was calculated using a straight average selling price for both free and paid apps. He added that the App Store has a gross margin of 44%.
“This does not factor in the roughly $81m Apple has spent since launch to deliver the 4b free apps that have been downloaded,” he wrote. “Over the same time period, the iTunes store has generated $3.6b in revenue, to which the App Store has contributed $429m, or 12%,” he added
The figures put into perspective what a small part of Apple’s business the App Store is. A contribution of $189 million amounts to just 1 percent of the $33.7 billion in gross profit the Cupertino, Calif., company has earned since the App Store launched. Apple has long admitted that the App Store is not a major profit center for the company.
“We see a virtuous cycle of Apple’s robust app ecosystem adding features and functionality to the iOS devices, which drives sales, which makes the ecosystem more robust, which encourages more developers to write apps, and the cycle repeats itself,” Munster Wrote
