Consumers of mobile apps differ substantially in the apps they prefer depending upon the country they live in, with Japanese and Chinese consumers most likely to download apps published exclusively in their respective countries, according to new research from Distimo.
The Dutch research firm's September study compares global user preferences in mobile app stores for content localization (local apps that are only published in one country) with widely distributed apps that are popular across national and linguistic barriers.
"Content differentiation is most important in Asia," writes Distimo analyst Hendrik Koekkoek, the study's lead author. The research firm, looking at Apple's iPhone App Store, found that 67 percent of the most popular iPhone applications in Japan are popular in that country only, while in China, 56 percent of the most popular iPhone apps are popular only in that country.
Globally, the average of iPhone App Store apps that are popular exclusively in just one country is 27 percent, according to Distimo.
Nokia's Ovi Store had the highest proportion among major app stores of applications published in just one country at 29.4 percent, a number that's skewed significantly by two outsized Nokia app developers in Italy and China's policy of only allowing gaming apps to be published by licensed aggregators KongZhong and Tom Online, and video apps to be published by CNR (those three publishers account for 5,845 Ovi Store apps published exclusively in China).
Other app stores contain just a fraction of country-exclusive apps as compared to the Ovi Store. The percentage of such apps in Apple's iPhone and iPad App Stores, Google's Android Market, and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 Marketplace ranges from 3.4 percent to 5.2 percent.
Consumers in the U.S. don't match Japanese and Chinese users in terms of a preference for local-only apps, but the size of the U.S. mobile app market means it has the most exclusively published apps, with 7,158 such apps in Apple's iPhone App Store alone.
Distimo also found that popular apps in one country were often popular in other countries sharing the same primary language or that were located in the same region. For example, the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada have an average overlap of top applications of 54 percent.
The research firm also published its lists of the top 10 free and paid apps in various app stores for the U.S. in August. Here's a selection of those results:
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