For those of us who practically live in third-party apps, it can be hard to believe that it’s even possible to own an iPad without immediately hitting the App Store… but a new Nielsen survey says that the app-less iPad is a common occurrence.
How common? According to the Nielsen Company, who polled over five thousand owners of “connected devices,” one-third of the iPad owners surveyed have never downloaded an application at all.
That makes sense, of course: the iPad is fantastic for media consumption and apps are only one small part of that equation. You can enjoy a wide range of internet content, music, movies and books on your iPad without ever once tapping on that App Store icon.
Once users do tap on that icon for the first time, though, that’s when Apple almost always starts making some money. According to Nielsen’s data, 63% of their respondents had downloaded a paid app, while only 5% had limited themselves to free ones.
That’s actually a much higher percentage of people paying for apps than I would have thought. It seems that once even the most nervous iPad-owner first downloads an app, they just can’t help but start forking over money.
