According to Skyhook Wireless over 300 iPhone apps are location-aware as of October 3rd. According to Mobclix there are over 4,000 apps in circulation. If these numbers are correct this puts the location-aware percentage at under 10% — far, far less than I would have suspected based on my own experience. There were 5.5 location-aware apps released per day in September. The location-aware apps 61% are paid (less than the 76% found in iPhone apps as a whole according to Mobclix).
The Social Networking, Local Search and Navigation Categories represent over 50% of the apps. Social Networking includes Twitter clients and friend finders like Whrrl and Pelago. Once Apple adds background location updating (I hope — Radar post) I expect the Sports category to bloom with pedometers, life-trackers and faux-GPSs.
Skyhook knows this because all of those apps use their service to determine a location. They’ve been tracking the apps as they’ve come out. Skyhook cannot publicly reveal the number of look-ups from location apps, but it’s a lot. Right now the look-ups are evenly split between using the iPhone’s GPS, WiFI (Skyhook’s WPS), and Hybrid (Skyhook’s XPS product can use Wifi, celltowers and GPS for a faster, more accurate lookup).
Skyhook has been making this data available for a while. You can find more on their site. All slides courtesy of Skyhook and posted with permission (regardless of what the Confidential footer may say).
I’ll be discussing location-aware apps with Skyhook Wireless CEO TEd Morgan (along with Greg Skibiski (Sense Networks), April Allderdice (MicroEnergy Credits), and Rich Miner (Google) ) at the Web 2.0 Summit. If you have any questions for them let me know in the comments.
Paid Vs. Free
Location Lookups By Source
