Five of the top six mobile apps in the U.S. during December, were from Google

Metrics firm comScore recently charted the top ten mobile apps in the U.S. for December, based on the number of unique visitors. The result? Five out of the top six names were produced by Google. Actually, the number one app is the one that is non-Google as Facebook led the way with 85.5 million unique visitors for the month. Google Maps was second with 74.6 million unique visitors during December. Google Play was next (61.5 million unique visitors), followed by Google Search, Gmail and YouTube. Those three had 60.6 million, 53.9 million and 52.6 million unique visitors in December, respectively.  Rounding out the top ten is Pandora Radio, Apple iTunes, Cooliris and Yahoo! Messenger. Apple removed YouTube and Google Maps from iOS 6 and that decision shows up in the chart comparing the number of unique visitors monthly for both the Facebook app and Google Maps. You can see how Google Maps fell behind Facebook at the same time the former app was removed from iOS 6.

Another chart shows that the  Facebook app is more "sticky" than Google's mobile apps in the U.S. In other words, users spent more time using the social networking site's app, which actually accounted for 23% of the time U.S. mobile device users spent using apps in December. Facebook owned Instagram accounts for another 3%. Last month, U.S. app users spent 10% of their time using apps from Google. Combined, one of every 3 minutes U.S. mobile device users spent using an app in December was on an app created by Facebook or Google. The numbers that comScore used were from U.S. based iOS and Android users 18 and older, during December.

source: comScore via BGR

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Paid apps drew $8 billion in revenue during 2012

Paid apps in the top 5 online app stores brought in revenue of $8 billion in 2012 according to a new report from research2guidance. The report wasn't all rainbows for the apps business as it stated that we have hit the dangerous point in app stores where the number of new apps is greater than the demand for them. That is the law of diminishing returns at work, which means that the monetary reward for getting that new app up and running might just not be worth it. The app stores included in the figures include the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, BlackBerry App World, Windows Phone Store and Nokia Ovi Store. The $8 billion generated by the top 5 app stores in 2012 was a rise of 27% over 2011's figures. On the other hand, the average revenue for paid apps dropped 27% from $26,720 in 2011 to $19,560 in 2012. That means that all of the increase in revenue last year can be explained as being the result of more apps being added to the stores. Keep in mind that these numbers include estimates for the fourth quarter based on actual data from Q1 through Q3 of last year.

The number of smartphone and tablet apps published hit 3 million in the third quarter of last year. The Apple App Store had a total of 951,890 apps as of the end of the third quarter while the Google Play Store was home to 453,719. The average retail price of a premium app was $2.82 at the end of Q3 with revenues hitting $3.4 billion in the three month period, which saw 12.4 billion downloads.

Other stats released by research2guidance found that last year, 179.7 million smartphones were shipped for a 16.7% gain sequentially, and were responsible for 40.4% of mobile device sales in 2012, up from 36.7%  in 2011. Samsung's market share was 31% of the mobile device market and Finnish based Nokia dropped out of the top five. During the the third quarter, Android was the only OS to gain market share according to research2guidance. Google's open source OS gained 5.3% in the three month period, while iOS lost 2.3% of market share.

source: research2guidance via TechCrunch

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