Three-quarters of iPhone / iPod Touch owners use apps

Everyone at Pinch Media was thrilled to see the comScore research on iPhone applications today, written up in some detail over at VentureBeat. comScore has a panel that shares with them everything they do online – we don’t know for sure, but we suspect the client comScore’s panel members are using to measure activity on online webpages now also peeks into the Mobile Applications folder of their iTunes library. If the panel is broad and representative enough, then you can draw conclusions about the market as a whole.

Pinch Media collects a different subset of data – we only know about the applications that use Pinch Analytics, and we don’t know anything about individual users, but we’ve got the complete picture when it comes to application runs, unique users, usage times, and so on – no panel here. And although we’re not inclined to talk about our specific clients, they do include a few applications mentioned in comScore’s press release.

This is awesome, because comScore’s data combined with our data lets us draw some conclusions we’ve never been able to draw before.

First, we can confirm that comScore’s data is pretty solid. For the most part, the ratios are right – applications higher on their list have more users than applications lower on their list, and in the correct proportions. (So an application with double the percentage reach actually does have about double the lifetime unique users.) Note that US application usage isn’t the same thing as world application usage – some of the applications on comScore list have stronger usage than others in other countries.

Next, we can combine comScore’s numbers with our own numbers to figure out the entire size of the application-using market. This is simple math – if we know an application with X% reach has Y users, how many users would an application with 100% reach have? Our best estimate, based on the data we’ve got combined with comScore’s reach percentages – the total number of devices running applications is between 22 and 23 million. This does assume that comScore’s US panel is representative of application users worldwide, but it’s a better estimate than any we’ve had in the past.

Finally, we can combine the 22-23MM figure with Apple’s recent announcement that more than 30MM iPhones and iPod Touches have been sold to get the estimate in the title of this blog post – about three-quarters of iPhone / iPod Touch owners have downloaded applications from the AppStore. That’s a higher percentage than we figured, and speaks to both the quality and variety of the applications available on the AppStore and the relative ease of downloading apps.

Developers interested in joining over 1,000 live iPhone applications and tracking their own application usage can sign up for our free Pinch Analytics product here.