A look at the Mac App Store before Lion launches

Apple’s new OS X Lion is expected to launch soon — possibly tomorrow — and it will officially usher in the era of the Mac App Store.

So before Lion arrives, I’ve taken a quick walk through the store and typed up a few notes. I’ll check back in a month or two and see if and how things have changed.

While the Mac App Store has been around since January, I look at that as more “practice” than anything else. (Although one developer told me at WWDC that it has already doubled his sales.) Lion will be the first version of OS X that is only available through the App Store, and that should raise much wider awareness. That, in turn, could drive more sales and app development.

• App quantity: 5,853 apps available, per AppShopper.
• Top paid apps: FaceTime, Pages, iSplash, Keynote, Numbers, iPhoto, Angry Birds, DeathSpank, iMovie, Xcode. 7 of top 10 paid are Apple apps.
• Top free apps: Smart Convertor, Full Deck Solitaire, Wallpapers HD Lite, Facebox Pro, VirtualDJ Home, Evernote, Twitter, Cloud, The Unarchiver, Jigsaws Galore. Good variety of app types.
• Top grossing apps: Final Cut Pro, Pages, Keynote, Aperture, Numbers, iPhoto, Motion, iMovie, Compressor, The Hit List. 9 of top 10 grossing are Apple apps.
• Average price of top-50 paid app: $20.39.
• Average price of top-50 grossing app: $45.59.
• Apps by Microsoft: 1, Windows Phone 7 Connector.
• Apps by Adobe: 0.

Also: The notebook PC industry has hit the wall — except for Apple