There has been a lot of chatter around the web lately about the massive success of iFart Mobile, a simple fart sound app that shot to #1 in Apple’s app store and had a huge spike in sales Christmas day with over 39, 000 units sold. Arnold Kim from MacRumors did a little research and found that iFart’s sales spike wasn’t an isolated case. Game developers from Toucharcade.com reported 3-4x sales growth across the board extending to games that weren’t even ranked in the top 100.
Key here though is to realize that the application sales spikes seem to have come from the popularity of the iPod Touch–in either 8 GB or 16 GB–this Christmas rather than the iPhone. Both models have been, and continue to be, the top two selling MP3 players at Amazon
As Kim points out, with the higher difficulty in obtaining an iPhone compared to an iPod Touch and with the latter heavily marketed as a gaming device rather than a traditional MP3 player, the increase in app sales should continue. I don’t think they’ll continue at such a high rate though. Even with a massive increase in the number of iPod Touch owners this Christmas, it’s likely only a small percentage of them will continue to download a bunch of new apps everyday. When my wife got her iPod Touch the app store craze only lasted for a couple of weeks. It’s been about 2 months since she last downloaded a new application.
Related Points Of Interest