The Zombies of the App Store
With more than 3/4 of its apps, getting no user attention at all, the App Store has turned into an app Zombieland.
It is not a secret to anyone anymore. The App Store is full of apps, many of which have long gone in oblivion, and others, which have been dead from the start, generating zero or very few downloads. Yet, the actual numbers are more striking than you may be thinking.
I first started researching about app discovery on the App Store around mid-2012. In early 2013, I started developing my own solution to tackle the problem, a platform I called PinApp, the concept of which I later defended in my Master’s thesis.
At that point in time, Adeven, a Berlin-based company was among the first to coin the term “App Store Zombie” — an app that has received none, or in significantly many downloads, virtually out of existence. Back in late 2012 the guys at Adeven claimed that the App Store was store more than halfway full of applications, which would hardly generate any downloads under normal circumstances. As I call them, applications at the deepest end of the long tail.
Almost two years later, I decided to plot the data provided to me monthly by a service of Adeven, called Apptrace. As you can see for yourselves, the situation has worsened significantly:
With more than 3/4 of its apps, getting no user attention at all, the App Store has turned into an app Zombieland. That’s a pretty gloomy picture, compared to what tech media shows us every day, right? Yet, it is the reality.
For those, who’d skeptically ask why worry about app discovery after all, I’ll just give one example: Flappy Bird. There are hundreds of speculations about the real cause of its post-App-Store-death hype, including some allegations about bot-networks and other semi-legal practices being used (which I doubt, TBH). Yet, whatever the real reason, the truth is that this simple, but catchy game came out of the depths of the App Store, and stuck to the top of the App Store charts, causing the fastest of its kind online craze. Flappy Bird turned the perceptions of app market experts and developers upside down, showing them how little they actually know, about what users really want.
Do you know how many other apps with the potential of being the next Flappy Bird lie on the bottom of the App Store ocean? Hundreds, thousands, perhaps, tens of thousands. Hidden gems that deserve to be found and used. Let’s join forces in discovering them and sharing them with the world!
