This week, we’re focusing on paid applications (for our post on piracy, see here). By providing some analysis of paid applications, we hope to answer some common support questions and give developers a sense of how their application’s performance compares to the ‘typical’ paid application.

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A Brief Overview:

A few months after the launch of the App Store, developers began reporting unexplained spikes in their new user numbers, spikes that were completely irreconcilable with iTunes Connect reporting on new downloads.  After investigating, it unfortunately became clear that this wasn’t an error in our reporting, but instead was due to application piracy.

To help developers better understand their traffic (and to cut down on customer support requests!), Pinch Media introduced jailbroken phone and pirated application detection to our analytics library and reports this June. We wanted to get developers a better handle on where their users were coming from, as well as some insights into the costs of piracy – both in terms of lost sales and in infrastructure costs, since many applications have a server back-end.
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Everyone at Pinch Media was thrilled to see the comScore research on iPhone applications today, written up in some detail over at VentureBeat. comScore has a panel that shares with them everything they do online – we don’t know for sure, but we suspect the client comScore’s panel members are using to measure activity on online webpages now also peeks into the Mobile Applications folder of their iTunes library. If the panel is broad and representative enough, then you can draw conclusions about the market as a whole.

Pinch Media collects a different subset of data – we only know about the applications that use Pinch Analytics, and we don’t know anything about individual users, but we’ve got the complete picture when it comes to application runs, unique users, usage times, and so on – no panel here. And although we’re not inclined to talk about our specific clients, they do include a few applications mentioned in comScore’s press release.

This is awesome, because comScore’s data combined with our data lets us draw some conclusions we’ve never been able to draw before.

First, we can confirm that comScore’s data is pretty solid. For the most part, the ratios are right – applications higher on their list have more users than applications lower on their list, and in the correct proportions. (So an application with double the percentage reach actually does have about double the lifetime unique users.) Note that US application usage isn’t the same thing as world application usage – some of the applications on comScore list have stronger usage than others in other countries.

Next, we can combine comScore’s numbers with our own numbers to figure out the entire size of the application-using market. This is simple math – if we know an application with X% reach has Y users, how many users would an application with 100% reach have? Our best estimate, based on the data we’ve got combined with comScore’s reach percentages – the total number of devices running applications is between 22 and 23 million. This does assume that comScore’s US panel is representative of application users worldwide, but it’s a better estimate than any we’ve had in the past.

Finally, we can combine the 22-23MM figure with Apple’s recent announcement that more than 30MM iPhones and iPod Touches have been sold to get the estimate in the title of this blog post – about three-quarters of iPhone / iPod Touch owners have downloaded applications from the AppStore. That’s a higher percentage than we figured, and speaks to both the quality and variety of the applications available on the AppStore and the relative ease of downloading apps.

Developers interested in joining over 1,000 live iPhone applications and tracking their own application usage can sign up for our free Pinch Analytics product here.

Recently, one of the users of Pinch Analytics noticed the string “iPhone 2,1″ appearing in their version reporting, and realized that if Apple stuck to its naming conventions, this might be the next version of the iPhone. At Pinch Media, we’ve seen this for some time now, and haven’t thought too much of it — even without this data, we’d just automatically assume Apple’s always working on new versions of their core products. But now that MacRumors and VentureBeat have picked up the story, here’s a little more information:

• the first time an application using Pinch Analytics was run by a ‘iPhone 2,1′ device occurred back in early October 2008;
• applications using Pinch Analytics were run by ‘iPhone 2,1′ devices very sporadically until mid-December 2008, when the pace picked up slightly;
• to date, a few dozen distinct ‘iPhone 2,1′ devices have run almost two dozen different applications using Pinch Analytics;
• when ‘iPhone 2,1′ devices run applications using Pinch Analytics’ optional geolocation tracking, they’re almost exclusively located in the south San Francisco Bay Area;
• while most of the sessions have been made from wifi connections, there’s been a few connections over AT&T’s network, so presumably this device handles both;
• the applications that have been run by Pinch Analytics don’t share much in common, except for their size — they’re among the larger applications to use our stuff, with hundreds of thousands to millions of unique users.

That’s all we’ve got – we don’t know what this is, what it does, what the display resolution is (sorry, tablet fans!) or when it’s going to be released. Device type breakdowns are located on our analytics dashboard – if you’re interested in seeing if your own iPhone application is being used by next-generation hardware, or you want to keep an eye out for future hardware versions, you can register for Pinch Analytics and install it in your iPhone application today.