iOS Owners Buying 61% More Apps This Year, Paying Higher Prices

The average price for iOS applications is now at $1.44, up 14% year-over-year. And consumers are buying more apps this year than they did last – 61% more, in fact. This data comes from a new report from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster (reported via Fortune), who found that today’s iOS device owners will download 83 applications this year, up from 51 in 2010.

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“Smartphone users are showing an increasing appetite to use apps to add features to their phones,” said Munster, “and iOS has the leading app ecosystem.”

The Apple App Store has more applications available than any of its competitors on the market today. Android, which has battled and even beaten iOS in terms of OS market share, is a distant second with “just” 200,000 applications, compared with Apple’s 425,000.

Although Android has a reputation for being home to an abundance of free applications, Apple does well on this front too. 82% of the apps in Apple’s store are free. The average selling price (ASP) of the remaining 18% has climbed up to $1.44, up 14% from 2010. Munster says the increase is due to the higher costs of the increasingly popular iPad apps.

While this data does sound like good news for mobile app developers, the high numbers of app downloads could be skewed a bit by the obsessive app collectors who download hundreds of mobile applications to their devices. Anecdotally, while I know plenty in the tech industry have phones filled with dozens of apps, I don’t know any average, mainstream users who have more than one or two dozen, max. Doesn’t 82 apps sound like a high number to you? Let us know what you think about this report in the comments.

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