Asia has emerged as a new destination for technology. It has emerged as a new hub of the world in terms of technology. All the technology focused reports are these days focusing on Asia.
In these circumstances, Distimo has published a report which give details about iPhone App usage across Asia. It is interesting to note that China has emerged as the second largest market for iPhone apps after the US in the world. It has mapped the download volumes of 300 top applications in the world. It has mapped all the download volumes on a logarithmic scale.
Download Volume:
The above figure demonstrates the download volume of 300 top applications in the world. The area which are marked dark blue represent the areas which have low download volume, whereas the area which are marked pink represent the areas which have high download volume. From the figure we see that US is the country having the most download volume. It is interesting to see that countries like China and South Korea represent the area having high download volume. One more interesting fact is that iTunes app store do not display games for South Korea, even then, the volume for the country is so high.
For India, the download volume has increased by 40% since December 2010.
Monetization:
Asians are price sensitive. They do not want to pay or want to pay very less for an app. If we compare US and Asia, we find that the proportion of paid downloads of an app is much lower in Asia than in the US.
Among Asia, Japan is the nation that pays the highest in terms of revenue for paid app. The ratio between the US and Asia in terms of money paid for app is about 1:3 (one is to three). If we take out Japan from Asia, the ratio falls to 1:6 (one is to six).
The average selling price for an app in Asia is $2.62 whereas in US it is $1.48.The average selling price of an app in India is $1.87,the average selling price of an app in Japan is much higher.
The ratio of paid apps with respect to total apps in Asia is about 7%, with highest for Japan at 6.05% and lowest for China at 0.99%. The same figure of India comes out to be 2.45%.
In App Purchase:
According to Distimo, Asians do not like in-app purchases, but the data tells different side of the story. In Singapore, 79% of revenue of top 200 grossing applications came from in-app purchase. This figure is even higher than that of the US which stands at 68%. Countries like Malaysia also has better figures. China has the lowest in-app purchase number at 34%. For India, the figure stood at 60%.
App Categories:
It was found that whatever works for US, also works for other Asian countries. Top App categories include games of all kinds, social networking and entertainment.
Localization:
Asian countries like South Korea and China have preference for local regional content. For example, in China, of the top 300 most popular apps, 65% of them are popular in local region. Asia in general prefers local taste and any app that has a local flavour attached to it would generally do well in Asian countries.
Well, overall we can say that even the people of Asia love the same kind of apps that are loved by people in the US including social networking, games and entertainment. Asia is different in a way, because it likes local taste. For app developers, they have to think of innovative and new ways in which they can make people indulge in paid apps as well as in-app purchase.