iPhone - Potential App Sales

Via a tweet, I ended up reading this post on Jonathan Wegener's Blog. It's about app sales on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Some of the highlights:

• 54 million iPhone/iPod Touches sold to date
• 8% of Americans own an iPhone/iPod Touch
• 3% market penetration for your paid app is high
• If you have 6 million people, who live in a country, your app will, at best, have sales of around 14,400 copies (figures are different in blog, he assumes NYC has a higher than average iPhone penetration).

Taking a look at Ireland (the Republic for now), population of around 4.1 million. Assume same 8% market penetration, you get 328,000 users (sounds high to me, but who knows). If you are selling a paid app, a very high rate of sales (on average for a paid app) would be 9,840. That's at the 99c price point. If you put that to €2.99, you will get 75% of those sales, giving you a figure of between €9,000-€22,000 for a top of the line app (targeted within Ireland).