ComScore Calls Shenanigans on Gartner’s 99.4% App Store Figure

Posted 01/19/2010 at 1:46pm | by Bart Salisbury

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It doesn’t get any more savage, or any more personal, than a knock-down, drag-out fight among market research firms. Gartner, this morning, released its report for mobile apps. It claims apps generated $4.9 billion in 2009, and that 99.4% of those revenues were collected by Apple’s App Store. For the math deficient, that means all other mobile apps accounted for only $25.2 million in 2009.

Yeah, right, responded comScore. In the language of the smackdown, Alistair Hill, a comScore analyst, said, “I think somebody's missed something out on the math there...I find that hard to believe. We know iPhone users buy a lot more apps than anybody else, but that [Gartner’s finding] still doesn't work.”

Is Gartner right? Maybe. Maybe not. Gartner doesn’t survey the entire app universe, so there’s a chance some data is missing. But, Apple reported 2.5 billion app downloads in 2009. Averaging revenues on downloads, Apple would only need to generate $1.67 per app download, so Apple’s revenue could be legitimate. (Gartner, responding to a follow up from Ars Technica, defends its figures as accurate.)

Image Credit: Gartner