Plan your app strategy for 2021 with the most important apple app store statistics

We have come half a year into 2020 and this has definitely been a crazy ride so far. We don't know what the next half of the year has in store for us. But, from an iOS application developer point of view, it's time we look past the year and plan for 2021. With Apple to launch iOS 14 in the coming years, the developers will have a new toy to play around with.

As the tech savvy user base of Apple are the target audience, the applications developed for them should be based on things they wish to see in the coming year. While it is difficult to exactly predict what they must be anticipating, we can come up with plans based on the statistics provided by Apple. Here are some of the factors i inferred from the statistics released by Apple which can be of great help in developing apps for 2021:

1. People check their phone a lot:

Though the smartphones are meant to be used at the comfort of one’s hand, a vast majority of people use them on an average of less than 4 hours a day. However, they tend to check their phones a lot. A report suggests that an average iPhone user checks their phone at least 80 times a day. This can be attributed to various reasons such as people being busy with their work or they just tend to have a smaller attention span.

iOS developers around the world should keep this fact in mind when they are developing an application. Notification plays an important role and it should be optimized to catch the attention of the user. The app should also be designed in such a way that works efficiently and quickly without any lag as people can get fed up with waiting long for an application to start up. Soft Suave is an iOS application development company who is very much aware of this fact and that's the reason behind all their applications having a faster start-up time.

1. Games are not just games here:

For people who have to endure lots of hassles in their day to day lives, mobile games are acting as an escape gateway giving them some quality time to relax and rejuvenate themselves. Be it free apps or Paid apps, it is the gaming applications that are ruling the roost everywhere. Out of 4 applications launched every year in the app store, 1 of them is a gaming application.

Games have a share of 22.37% in the app store while the business apps which ranks second has a share of 10.12%. This vast difference in the market share can be a testimonial to the fact that a good number of iOS users are gamers. What’s interesting is the gaming pattern of the free apps users and that of the paid app users. While strategy based games like Plague inc and Minecraft are favourite among the paid app section, it is completely opposite in the free app section with action games like The Battle of Polytopia and Call of Duty ruling the chart.

1. Keep the pricing low:

While iOS devices are generally purchased by people with a bigger wallet, it can’t be used as criteria to price an application. The average cost of a normal app is 86 cents while that of gaming apps is 56 cents. In Spite of the fact that people are not spending high on app purchases, it is nullified by the people ready to spend on in-game purchases.

So, developers can use in-app purchases as a business model to make money rather than depending on the purchase cost of an app. Also, the economy of volume must be employed here as apps costing less with more purchases by users will tend to generate more revenue compared to the ones you will get from an app that costs more but with minimal purchases.

Conclusion:

No matter how awesome the application is, at the end of the day the success of it depends upon how the users receive them. Developers should develop mobile applications that resonate well with the behavioural pattern of the users as it is the scale which let us identify what the end users want and don't want.

George is the Head of Business Development at Soft Suave. Being the Cornerstone of Soft Suave, George inspires and manages a team of senior salespeople who create opportunities for business growth.