Is the Droid the Iphone killer? Is it not? How do 100,000 Droids sold in one weekend compare versus the 1 million Iphones? Frankly, it is not relevant.

Iphone and Droid

Questioning the supremacy of the Iphone sounds like an heresy today and it will be for a few more months (maybe 12, maybe less). But who is creating a healthier and open-source  application store eco-system for developers, OEMs and carriers ?

If you doubted the answer was Google and Android, Monday’s announcement on the Google acquisition of AdMob for $750million will make you think twice.

With 60% of the app being free ones, the winner in the app store war will not be measured in the long-term by the number of handsets sold, but by the ability to offer a sustainable environment, where users get value and access to relevant content and developers and brands are rewarded for their efforts.  And that’s where AdMob comes into place, offering the learning from the AppStore as a way to complement and jump-start the Android Marketplace.

Apple’s fans point to Itunes as a benchmark of success. But was it? Isn’t “piracy” still 95% of the music consumption? Now call that a long-term success.

Another App Store Day is on us. With lots of numbers to dive into.

According to Apple’s official press release, 2 billion apps have been downloaded in just over a year. Itunes took 6 years to sell 8.5 billion songs.
But….
-$0.99 is not $0.00.
-Buying a song is a conscious act- you really want it, you want to listen to it over time, you want it on your Ipod. Apps are an impulse driven “purchase”.
-Many apps come with the price tag $0, which makes the impulse of downloading even more irresistible.

But one more set of data has made the news today. This time it comes from Flurry, a mobile analytics and monetization tools start-up in San Francisco, and it’s a study on the behavior of users who download apps and their churn rate.
For the purpose of the report, Flurry used a sample of 2,000 apps and 200 million user sessions on the IPhone and iPod touch, Google Android, Blackberry, and J2ME platforms.
Apps were grouped into 19 categories and their use was monitored within 30, 60 and 90 days.

The Good:

1) The apps in the News and Reference category, Quadrant I, which are used more than once a day, at a rate of 11 times per week.

2) A little less good, but still not bad, the apps from the Productivity, Social Networking and Utilities categories, in Quadrant IV, which have  a less intense usage over time, but still a loyal customer base.

The Bad:

The apps in Quadrant III, the IQ Test and Ringtones of the case, which gets abandoned right after the download. No surprise here.

The Quitters:

Apps from the categories Games and Books  in Quadrant II, which generate the most downloads across the different stores and are used very often, but over a very limited and finite timeframe. In other words, a very “disposable” user experience, which might only account for a one-off fee business model, as opposed to subscription or ad-supported models for the categories in Quadrant I and IV.

No one will be surprised by this data. But if you’re planning to build an app, getting noticed among almost 80,000 other apps is not going to be your only challenge.

They say that personalization is coming to the 2010 web, in the form of filters and recommendations, to help user discover relevant data.

They also say that the vast majority of Twitter users are clueless. And Twitter’s efforts to engage and educate them through the Suggest User List (SUL) and the tiny ads of Twitter apps haven’t done much so far. TV celebs and the likes seem to only drag with them a few millions of rather inactive “viewers”….Neither could Twitter implement Facebook Connect to educate users through their Facebook tweetering friends…

Lastly, everybody knows  that third party applications, built through Twitter APIs, made it the $1billion success story that it is today, by spreading its usage in new and creative ways. But the only publicity that they get back from Twitter are tiny ads on the Twitter web site.

So here comes Laura Fitton, aka @pistachio, with oneforty.

Oneforty is  a social app store, where users can discover new apps and developers get to showcase their latest creations.

The discovery process can be done through charts of featured or popular apps, by categories or through lists generated by the site’s tagging system.  Each app has its own “Fan Page”, with links to download or rate it, the developer’s Twitter ID, user reviews, who else is using the apps, related tweets and press mentions. So a mix of filtered and social discovery in a neat and clean interface.

When you create your oneforty account, the site uses the Twitter API to generate your  profile. You can then customize it by “adding”  Twitter apps to it, and writing about who you are, your interests and who you like on Twitter.

On the other hand, developers are being encouraged to claim their apps so that they can have the ability to add information (e.g. screenshots and press mentions) to the apps’ profiles.

Oneforty’s revenue model is fairly basic. If you want to download a paid mobil app, oneforty provides a link to Apple’s App Store, allowing oneforty to collect an affiliate fee. But there’s a lot more potential to it.

Remember what Facebook was before its platform?  Remember it was still trailing  way behind MySpace? Twitter, for how big it seems today, is still in its infancy and shaped more as a platform than a community. Apps educate, engage, trigger the viral process. Laura Fitton’s oneforty could play a major role in this process, making Twitter closer to the mass market and helping developers improve the Twitter still harsh ecosystem.

I am not sure of how oneforty plans to promote itself. The most logical thing would be to see Twitter acquiring it, right away, or cloning it. We’ll see. The year of the App Stores has still 100 days before its end!

It’s StoreMania again. This time thanks to RIM.

At CTIA, the new Blackbery App World was announced. The store has hundreds of apps available at launch, and RIM says it expects around a thousand to be available in its first week. Like Apple’s store, RIM’s offers both free and paid apps that download directly to your device.

The Blackbery Store has a nice inteface, but some oddities. The main one is that it is only available for relatively recent BlackBerry models–the ones with trackballs, starting with the Pearl which means that millions of people with older models can’t use the app store.

Besides the details, what’s interesting is that as for the IPhone, RIM plans to focus its Store on Music. RIM’s president Mike Lizaridis pitched the Store in his CTIA keynote by pointing out that not only is it sponsoring U2’s upcoming world tour, but there’s a ton of music applications: Slacker, Pandora and Shazam, iheartradio and Will.i.am’s DipDiv. RIM has also secured an exclusive with Ticketmaster, which allows people to buy tickets to shows. In addition, BlackBerry is  supporting both Windows Media Player and iTunes to allow people to get songs on to the device and is rolling out Bluetooth devices that are plugged into your car or home stereo, so you can listen to your music on your BlackBerry without having to dock it.

It didn’t take long for the Iphone App Store to become a paradigm shifter in the music industry and mobile entertainment space.

A few milestones from the last few months

-Pink! launches a branded Iphone app, FunHouse, to promote her new album. The app is sort of bare-bobe, with 30-second previews of songs from the album, photos, news and a discography and obviously direct links to buy Pink’s back catalog from the iTunes Store.

-SnowPatrol follow with the release a 3-D interactive booklet, a very artsy one with lyrics and videos.

-David Cook sells his single LightOn as an app with a virtual lighter, for double its normal Itunes price

-it’s then the turn of the Nine Inch Nails with their edition of the Guitar Hero-like app for the iPhone and iPod Touch which lets you tap along to 13 songs from The Slip and Ghosts I-IV on the famous game’s three note tracks. It costs $4.99 in the US, and ties in with a competition for NIN gig tickets and a signed guitar.

-Innovation continues with the Deadmau5’s iPhone app ($3 on iTunes) that lets you load any of 10 quantized Deadmau5 tracks into a dual-track playback engine, which works  like a professional DJ software while being easy enough for anyone to experiment with.

-In February The President of the United States of America release four albums as an iPhone application that costs just $3. The app includes the four albums whose rights are owned by the band, as well as rare recordings, live tracks and demos. They’re all streamable playlists – which doesn’t come as a surprise since their singer is also a mobile music veteran, now VP of Business Development at Melodeo (the maker of nuTsie a software application that can stream your iTunes playlists to any web-connected PC, your Blackberry and your Facebook profile).

-It’s then the turn of free apps for Lady Gaga, the Pussycat Dolls, Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, the All American Rejects, and Keri Hilson. The apps include video content from the artists’ Kyte channels, as well as branding and advertising, click-through links to buy music and merchandise, a built-in RSS reader to pull in news updates, and community features like chat, comments and sharing. Kyte has a partnership with both Sony Music and Universal Music Group.

As predicted by Wired, the AppStore has changed the way music is merchindised and bands interact with their fans. RIM is following and for sure it doesnt want to be just a follower. So more is to be expected.