Digital Media Buzz > Distimo Provides Insight & Analysis Across Top App Stores

Distimo Provides Insight & Analysis Across Top App Stores

By Ron Callari

Less than a week after Apple introduced its iPad, its app store was offering approximately 2,400 applications optimized for the tablet device and “games” represented 35 percent of all iPad titles. This analysis, coupled with comparison pricing, number of apps sold and the specific app store breakdowns by source is a small snapshot of the work that is done by Distimo, an innovative app store analytics company that addresses the widely fragmented app store marketplace.

Distimo, a privately held company based in the Netherlands provides in-depth reports and analytical monitoring for companies interested in how their apps are doing across the mobile application ecosystem. While the company competes with the traditional market analysis companies such as comScore, Forrester and Gartner, in stead of basing findings on panels and surveys, “Distimo Reports,” according to co-founder and VP of development Remco van del Elzen, “are more timely and accurate, covering the whole app store market based on factual information.”

Jan-Joost Rueb, CEO and co-founder of eBuddy, a Web based instant messaging service uses Distimo’s reports and monitoring analytics for his firm. Differing from some of the other research companies, he finds most useful, Distimo’s ability to not only track popularity of his app in other countries, but also to “compare the performance of competing applications with our own apps.”  The total cumulative download (to date) breakdown per source for eBuddy is shown here.

Interesting to note, eBuddy app is #2 most downloaded app on GetJar (behind Facebook).

Both Distimo Reports and Distimo Monitor are free to companies. The Monitor service offers mobile developers a free analytics tool to track their own and competitive applications across all app stores, without any adjustments needed to their application’s code. The company is monetized by selling their reports to device manufacturers, operators and large developers, with the future goal of “introducing premium features,” notes van del Elzen.

Companies can view daily downloads and revenue figures of all their applications and analyze their rankings, worldwide and compare these findings to how the competition is doing in terms of publicly available data, such as popularity, rankings and price changes.

The app stores currently analyzes findings from the six largest applications stores in existence today: the Apple App Store, Blackberry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile.  According to an aggregate report of the number of applications available in the market for the month of March, it is clear that Apple’s App Store is by far the clear front-runner.

Book apps are proven to be lucrative for the eReader market. One of Distimo’s studies indicates that the highest percentage of apps in the Apple App Store is now paid book applications. For example, there are 27,0000 books in the store, and of those 92 percent are paid apps, according to Distimo’s data. When questioning van del Elzen why Kindle, Sony Reader and Barnes and Noble’s Nook were not included in their reports and monitoring, he indicated that Distimo currently focuses on the stores that provide applications. “The line between applications and books however is blurring and we will provide analytics on some of the eReader market as well,” he notes.

The different ratios of free apps versus paid were one of the findings that Distimo presented during MWC 2010. In the chart below you can see the percentage breakdowns per store. While Android has the most free applications, Nokia has the most paid.

Developers can use Distimo’s data-mining to adjust pricing and distribution channels to maximize growth and revenue streams of their apps.

Rueb finds Distimo’s analysis invaluable because of the changing competitive market his firm has to deal with on a daily basis.  Tracking eBuddy’s performance on a worldwide level with Distimo, Rueb sums up Distimo as a service that which “allows us to act fast, based on country level analyses, popularity of competing apps and competitor’s actions.”