The secrets of App store pricing revealed

The latest Distimo Report, based on February 2010 data has some interesting reading, especially if you’re looking at building Apple apps. The monthly report focuses on the worldwide Apple App Store and it finds that the more expensive the app, the more popular the app is – obviously there’s a limit here – in Europe, but the rest of the World is a little more price conscious.

The report found that the most popular applications are the most expensive, but those averages change where you are in the globe. In Europe the average is $3.86 average, however the most popular application prices are the least expensive in North America and Asia where they cost $2.43 and $2.69 respectively, on average. Although as Distimo points out “this may reflect that less expensive applications are more popular in North America and Asia, this may also be caused by the fixed price tiers that Apple uses for converting application prices to other currencies than USD (EUR, GBP, etc)”

Overall and worldwide, prices of the most popular applications have decreased 15% on average during the period, December 1, 2009 through February 28, 2010. The largest relative price decrease occurred in Australia where prices dropped 27% from $3.77 to $2.74.

The most popular applications in the Navigation category are the most expensive in Europe. This is due to the large number of turn-by-turn navigation applications covering different regions in Europe (e.g. TomTom Western Europe, Eastern Europe, UK and Ireland). It will be interesting to see how this changes as Nokia’s offer of free navigation apps for its Ovi users starts to hit home. We suspect the manufactures will keep their prices high to try and squeeze the last drops out of the market.

Games are still the most popular category in Australia and North America (USA, Canada and Mexico), where 51% and 39% of the applications respectively, ranked in the top overall category are games.

You can download the report here this link