Report Shows Apple App Store Still Reigns Supreme in Marketing Opportunities for App Developers

Which app store should app developers target their marketing efforts? How mature are the three major app stores, and, more importantly, how good could they be? The answers may be gleaned from a recent report from Pfeiffer Consulting, a consulting firm that provides strategic analysis on emerging trends and technologies.

The report analyzes the three major app providers for smartphones and tablets, the iOS App Store from Apple, Google Play, and the Amazon Appstore. To analyze and rate the maturity and sophistication of the available app stores, Pfeiffer used four specific research angles: search, discovery assistance and content curation, the App Store Maturity Evaluation Grid, and App Store User Experience Friction, or App Store UXF.

All of these aspects were rated based on the 2013 App Store Reference Definition, an idealized set of features for a mature, sophisticated app store developed by Pfeiffer to attempt to quantify the maturity of currently available app stores in a more objective way, by comparing them not only to their direct competition, but to an independent reference.

As a benchmark, all app stores provide the same core functionality: they display apps listed in order of popularity, organizing them in a basic set of categories, and sorting them according to a fixed set of criteria and add a certain number of handpicked apps to the mix. The report looked at what lies beyond this core functionality.

The combined results of the four different benchmarks and evaluations underline two key findings: 1) Apple is clearly ahead of the competition in terms of overall app store maturity and 2) None of the app stores currently come even close to the ideal score.

Search Function Rankings

The analysis of the search function in the app stores was based on five criteria (natural language search, support for search operators, searches containing typos, advanced search options, etc.) The results show that all three app store providers could do much better in terms of user-focused search options with Google scoring the best, followed closely by Apple with Amazon ranking third.

Discovery Assistance Rankings

Beyond popularity ratings, what do the app stores offer to enhance serendipitous discovery of apps for a great variety of users and interests? This benchmark empirically surveyed the number of specially featured apps, number of groups of apps for specific needs and activities, as well as number of subcategories. Apple was the clear leader here with Google and Amazon ranked far lower.

App Store Characteristics Rankings

Pfeiffer created an app store evaluation grid to create a unified score based on eight key characteristics that are individually rated on a scale of 1 to 5. The eight characteristics analyzed are what Pfeiffer determined were the key aspects that differentiate a mature app store from the baseline functionality prevalent today. Areas analyzed include content curation and presentation of individual apps, among others. Again, Apple was far ahead of Google and Amazon in this ranking.

User Experience Rankings

User Experience Friction (Pfeiffer defines this as basically anything which separates the device from that ideal user experience) provides an understanding on which underlying user experience issues exist in the app stores. In this ranking, Google Play scores much better than Amazon and Apple which had similar scores.

To see the full report and analysis, click the link below.