The first interesting thing pointed out in the report is that the iPod Touch has quickly risen to be the second most popular application platform behind the iPhone. The iPod Touch with we generally think of as a music device has users launching apps almost as frequently as the iPhone. Proving that the iPod Touch as a gaming platform ad campaign by Apple is starting to pay off.

Next up is network usage by iPhones. It’s no surprise that iPhone users seek out wifi networks as often as possible. The amazing thing is that they are doing so 53% of the time they are using the network within applications. Even odder is that of that time they are using unsecured open wifi networks 16% of the time.

Focusing on iPhone games, they note that in their test group, the average lifetime of a game is just 3 months with the peak usage coming in at around 7 weeks. This is interesting to note that some games such as classic card games and games that include social interactions have a longer life. More indications why this year will be the year that community gaming systems become huge on the iPhone OS.

Flurry suggests that game developers plan, for maximum usage and income, to release a new game or upgrade of an existing game every 8 weeks to ride the wave of this usage pattern. Good advice, even if it’s hard for a small developer to meet that timeline.

The statistic that they released that got a few people talking, and arguing with, was the upgrade statistic. With this test group, they observed that only a little over 7% of users upgraded their applications within the first 2 weeks of an upgrade being available. And only 18% total had upgraded after the first 2 months. This, of course is very dependent on the application.

Thanks to Flurry for providing this data.

About Flurry Analytics:

Flurry offers cutting-edge analytics, deployment and monetization tools for mobile application developers. Its services platform is offered free to application developers allowing them to better save money, increase revenues and improve their products. Flurry’s platform is built by developers for developers, based on its pioneering experience as one the first developers to build, deploy and market direct-to-consumer applications. Flurry is venture-backed and is based in San Francisco.
http://www.flurry.com

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