I'm not all that certain that the iApp Store's success can be extrapolated to the Mac App Store for several reasons...
- The iApp Store was "present at the creation" and, rather than beginning life competing with pre-existing solutions, began it as the only game in town.
space - I posted a while back that my personal observation has been that friends who don't run a single 3rd party app or utility on their Macs have gone wild with iApps, and that appears to be supported by this CNN (
) article that tells us that "The average iOS device owner will download 83 apps in 2011 [....]" On the other hand, I doubt that any, other than a very few in-depth, hard-core Mac users are running that much 3rd party stuff in total, let alone d/l'ing anywhere near that much in a single year. (Emphasis added)
space - The same article also tells us that "82% of the apps in Apple's store are free. The 18% that users have to pay for have an ASP of $1.44," and I suspect that the 82% and the $1.44 are significantly higher and lower, respectively, than their Mac App Store equivalents.
Accordingly, while I'm not suggesting that the MAS will be anything other than another successful Apple venture, I do wonder whether it can come close to mirroring the iApp Store's success.
I suggest a poll, the results of which may be telling, asking FTM posters how many 3rd party apps, i.e. apps that weren't present on their device out of the box, they're running on their Macs as opposed to how many they're running on their iPhones (if they've got an iPhone). Free v "for pay" would be interesting to know, as would total cost, but I suspect that those numbers may be beyond many people's ability to produce.
