2010 maybe the last year that Apple dominates the app market?

Distimo have published their round up of the app market in 2010 and it looks like 2010 maybe the last year that Apple dominates the app market statistics, and this year may see a turn from paid apps as standard to subscription-based apps as the norm.

The Apple App Store is – as expected – the app store that grew most in 2010 in terms of the absolute number of applications, there was no other market that could touch it in 2010, however the runner- up’s show more growth in terms of percentages, and 2011 finds a major threat in the form of Android. At the start of 2010 we would have predicted that Android would do well but we were surprised by just how successful the platform has been.

The Apple App Store for iPhone doubled it’s total during the past year to almost 300,000 applications, while the total number of applications available for Google Android Market stands at almost 130,000 apps, that’s six times the number of applications available a year ago.

The fast growth isn’t just left to the usual suspects, both BlackBerry App World and Nokia Ovi Store showed triple digit growth in the last year, with Blackberry growing to nearly 18,000 applications and Nokia up to 25,000 applications, respectively. Nokia’s free app growth was a staggering 899% over 2010, we suspect that most of that growth was mostly produced via their free app builder wizard.

The top 300 free applications in the United States generated, on average, over 3 million downloads each day during December 2010, while only 350,000 paid applications are downloaded daily. However, paid downloads increased by almost 30% more than free downloads in the top 300 when comparing the download figures of December 2010 to those of June 2010.

Comparing June data to that of December in the United States, the share of revenue generated by in-app purchases from the highest grossing free applications more than doubled for both the iPhone and iPad. At the same time, the share of revenue generated by in-app purchases from free applications is much smaller on iPad (15%) compared to iPhone (34%).

While the proportion of free applications grew, the average price of the applications also declined. A decline in price can be observed in the 100 most popular applications in the Apple App Store for iPhone, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market and Nokia Ovi Store.

The full report is available here to download

As always, the disclaimer with Distimo is it doesn’t cover every app platform and it’s heavily US biased. The report covers the Apple App Store for iPad, the Apple App Store for iPhone, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, Windows Marketplace for Mobile (6.x), and the new Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.

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