Sales & Business Development Manager
Dependant on experience
UK - London
Independent app store gathering a head of steam
GetJar says it's now generating more than three million downloads a day, cementing its position as the second largest app store behind Apple's.
CEO Ilja Laurs says that daily downloads have tripled in the last year, with people in more than 200 countries now using the site.
GetJar also says that Android apps are becoming an increasingly important part of its business - it's now the second most popular platform in terms of submissions to the store.
"As consumers move from ‘browsing and searching’ to ‘downloading and tapping’, we are seeing that apps are becoming a mainstream way for people to consume content not only in the developed markets on smartphones but all over the world on all different types of handsets," says Laurs.
These three million daily downloads are all free, of course. GetJar has released a list of the ten most popular: Facebook, eBuddy, Nimbuzz, mig33, Opera Mini, Yahoo! Mobile, Google, Yahoo! Mail, Bolt, and YouTube.
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CMO Patrick Mork says patterns are emerging in terms of app popularity around the world though.
"We see Indian consumers downloading more productivity applications that enhance the usage of their phone compared to Americans for example and English consumers downloading more entertainment apps then Indians. Religious apps are popular in the Middle East."
Considering the iPhone App Store is seeing 2 billion app downloads every 2 months and counting (16 million per day), GetJar's figures are not terribly fantastic considering GetJar caters for so many more phones and manufacturers.
Add to that the fact that a significant portion of App Store downloads are paid-for, high quality native apps compared to the low-quality, free java shovelware of GetJar and it pales even more.
-Mart
To be objective, Apple includes automatic updates in their download numbers and on average 1 unique downloads gets 3-4 updates. With this in mind, GetJar's 3M is almost on par with Apple's 4M-5M, as GetJar can't do and therefore calculate updates.
On the contrary, Apple has previously stated that updates to existing software are not counted n the download numbers so the actual figure would in fact be far higher.
In contrast GetJar counts every download even if a user re-downloads an app or gets the latest update.
As such the disparity between the two services is even more drastic.
-Mart
Mart,
I've seen your exact same post on at least 3 other blogs. no chance you're an Apple employee are you? I work for GetJar but everyone knows that ;)
That you can compare a company that does 13.5 billion in revenue a quarter with us is pretty amusing but I guess I'll take that as a compliment. At least your share options must be doing well fan boy ;)
cheers
P
