Mobile app acquisition and spending trends

Stefanus HadiThe following analysis is based on DiscountASP.NET’s survey conducted in March 2013. To gain some insight into our customers’ mobile application download behavior, we’ll look into data from our USA-based customers. We had 840 responses from the U.S. which represents about a 6% response rate.

We split our USA-based respondents into two groups, one group who had experience building mobile applications and the other group that did not. We found that 47% of the U.S.-based customers had experience building mobile applications, while 53% did not.

For labeling purposes, we will use the term as “Mobile App Developers” to refer to the 47% of customers that had experience building mobile applications. We will use the term as “ASP.NET Web Developers” to refer to the 53% of customers that did not have experience in building mobile apps.

In the next section, we observe the differences between these two groups in their mobile application download behavior in terms of application acquisition and spending.

(1) Acquisition

Mobile-application-acquisition

Among all of our USA-based customers, 10% of mobile app developers claimed that they only downloaded free mobile applications, while a higher percentage (17%) of ASP.NET web developers only downloaded free mobile apps.

(2) Spending

In the survey, we asked our customers how much they spent on acquiring mobile applications and the results are displayed in the following two charts. 19% of mobile app developers indicated that they spent less than $10 on acquiring mobile applications, compared to 31% of ASP.NET web developers who spent less than $10.

Mobile-application-spending-10

In contrast to the chart above, 23% of mobile app developers spent over $50 to acquire mobile applications, while only 12% of ASP.NET web developers who spent over $50.

Mobile-application-spending-50

In conclusion, the study showed that mobile app developers spent more money to get apps than ASP.NET web developers, and ASP.NET web developers are more likely to go for free apps than mobile app developers.

About Dr. S. Hadi

Dr. Hadi was a Senior Research Analyst at DiscountASP.NET. Before that, he spent seven years at Hostway Corporation. He received his Ph.D. from University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.

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