A look at the Mac App Store, 100 million downloads later

Apple announced yesterday that in less than a year, Mac users have downloaded 100 million apps from the Mac App Store.

With around 60 million Macs out there, that suggests the average Mac user has downloaded at least one app, but fewer than two. (Though common sense suggests that the downloads are probably distributed differently. Perhaps 20% of Mac users are responsible for 80% of the downloads? I’ve personally downloaded 8, excluding OS X Lion.)

Either way, it’s not too shabby, given that the Mac App Store only started shipping on new Macs this past July, when Lion launched. But it’s also not like the numbers that Apple is seeing from the iOS App Store — 18 billion apps downloaded. That’s why iOS is Apple’s future.

Here’s a quick look at the state of the Mac App Store, similar to those I published in September and July.

• App quantity: 8,488 apps, up from 6,976 in September, per AppShopper. That suggests about 18 apps are added to the Mac App Store each day. Not a very big number, but that’s not the most important stat here.
• Top paid apps: OS X Lion, Pages, iPhoto, FaceTime, Keynote, Numbers, Growl, Angry Birds Seasons, iMovie, Pixelmator. 7 of the top 10 paid are Apple apps, up from 6 before. 6 of the same top-1o paid apps as in September.
• Top free apps: TweetDeck, Evernote, Gutterball, Full Deck Solitaire, Xcode, Kindle, Twitter, The Unarchiver, Alfred, and Screen Snake. 5 of the same top-10 free apps as in September.
• Top grossing apps: OS X Lion, Final Cut Pro, Pages, Logic Pro, iPhoto, Keynote, Numbers, Aperture, Pixelmator, Adobe Photoshop Elements. 8 of top 10 grossing are Apple apps, up from 7 before. 8 of the same top-10 grossing apps as in September.
• Average price of top-50 paid app: $26.53, up 24% from September.
• Average price of top-50 grossing app: $73.29, up 12% from September.
• Apps by Microsoft:1, Windows Phone 7 Connector. (Same as before.)
• Apps by Adobe: 3, Photoshop Elements, Carousel, and Premiere Elements. (Up from 1 before.)

Note: July, September, and December aren’t equally spaced apart, so the time element isn’t to scale. (That’s the only data I have — I wasn’t writing this site in June.) But I think they tell the story — steady growth — well enough.

Also: A closer look at Apple’s Mac business