Report: Mac App Store Dominated By Paid Apps

The Mac App Store is off to a slower start than the iOS App Store, according to a new market research report by Distimo, which tracked data across a number of app stores including Apple’s, the Android Market, the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and more.

The Mac App Store is also made up of a much higher percentage of paid apps than the iOS App Store. A scale-topping 88% of all Mac App Store apps are paid, with only 12% being free.

I’m not much surprised by these numbers. The Mac software ecosystem was incredibly fertile long before the Mac App Store came on the scene, and much of the App Store’s earliest titles weren’t newly made for the platform, but instead existing paid apps ported over. Of course most of the Mac App Store apps are paid: existing paid Mac apps had the most to gain and the smallest barrier-to-entry to hit the Mac App Store running at launch. I imagine that these numbers will shift dramatically as OS X Lion makes the OS X experience more iOS-like.

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.