The Wireless Industry Partnership has released their July App(lication) Report. Here’s a snippet of its summary:
Looking through many of the major app(lication) stores reveals a few things that haven’t changed all that much since the days when carrier WAP portals dominated the mobile content business. In particular, the dominance of larger app makers in the top-download charts and in the “featured app” slots harkens back to the days when the biggest winners in the mobile content space were the companies with the best biz dev teams, not the best apps and content.
Some app(lication) stores, such as the iTunes App Store, do a decent job of highlighting content from lesser-known developers alongside the big names, but the reality in most stores is that it’s truly a long tail game. Like in so many things, the 80/20 rule provides a good rough estimate: in this case, 80 percent of the apps are sold by 20 percent of the providers — leaving the other 80 percent of developers fighting over the rest of the market.