by Cesare Rocchi

Percentage of Apple Watch apps

by Cesare Rocchi

Tags: apple watch

How many watch apps are there? While searching for the answer I stumbled upon this report by AppAnnie. On June 8th there were 6,352. When I found it I felt it wasn’t a lot interesting. So I came up with a different question:

In the countries in which the Apple Watch has been released, which is the percentage of apps that have a companion Watch app?

I extrapolated some of the data that I have via AppVersion and http://canihazawatchapp.com and then I started crunching. The Apple Watch is on sale in 15 countries so far:

  • Australia
  • Canada
  • China
  • France
  • Germany
  • Hong Kong
  • Italy
  • Mexico
  • Singapore
  • Sounth Korea
  • Spain
  • Switzerland
  • Taiwan
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

For each of these countries I pulled the first 10 positions of the following ranks:

  • Top Paid
  • Top Free
  • Top Grossing
  • New Applications
  • New Free Applications
  • New Paid Applications

I didn’t pull genre by genre, so these are “top of the top”, essentially the first screen that you see on iTunes when you open the “Apps” section. All the data were pulled yesterday, June 29th.

I ended up with 1082 apps. Some of them are iPad only apps, for which you can’t technically build a watch extension. So I filtered those out and I was left with 939. How many of those have a Watch app?

… drum roll …

61

That’s 6.5%. I have mixed feelings about this number. Here is how I tried to rationalize it:

  • A good chunk of apps in the top ranks are pretty heavy graphics games, for which a Watch app probably doesn’t make sense.
  • It’s still early, I know many developers that have bought a Watch but it has not been delivered yet. They probably wanna test it on the device before submitting the app to the store.
  • The news about Watch OS 2 probably changed the plans of those who were planning to release a Watch app soon.
  • Everybody is cautious, the Apple Watch is a totally new device and requires some time to understand what people expect from this kind of apps.

I am planning to do some study like this genre by genre in the future. What do you think? Let me know on Twitter.