iOS users love free apps , 90% apps free in App Store

iOS users love their free apps, and developers have taken note.

A full 90 percent of all iOS apps available in the App Store are now free purchases, according to a report from Flurry Analytics.

Apple’s online app warehouse, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, has always been a hub for free downloads. According to Flurry’s data, which is collected from the 350,000 apps that use its analytics platform, the number of free apps in the App Store has hovered between 80 and 84 percent since 2010. But this year, that number has spiked upwards.

Free apps are often ad-supported versions of an app that costs money, or “light” versions of paid apps which rely on lower-quality content. And, as Flurry says in its report, the majority of app consumers are OK with that.

“People want free content more than they want to avoid ads or to have the absolute highest quality content possible,” the report reads.

Many apps use the in-app purchase model, which makes a free version available in the App Store, then encouraging users to upgrade the free version for a few bucks to unlock advanced features.

RunKeeper is one of these. While the company says that it has grown the app’s paying user base significantly this past year, those paying users are still a small percentage of the total users (it wouldn’t disclose exact figures).

But if RunKeeper wasn’t a free download, the company wouldn’t be able to reach the casual downloaders or have the opportunity to turn them into dedicated (paying) users. It also wouldn’t have as many people building profiles, logging their runs, and interacting with others — all things that bring value to RunKeeper’s service, which relies on runners sharing their achievements.

“We would never be able to create network effects and unlock the value in our aggregate data if we operated at the restricted scale of a paid app,” says RunKeeper VP of product Fareed Mosavat.

And then there are ad-supported apps. Including ads is a common way for free apps to monetize — so common that it may not present a problem to most app users. But there are inherent trade-offs to using a free, ad-supported app that do concern iOS device owners.

“When a user gets a paid app, he knows that he paid for something and expects a certain amount of value,” says Denys Zhadanov, a developer for productivity app-maker Readdle. “When a user gets a free app, he is concerned on how his data might be used and how the developer will monetize this download in the future.”

We’ve seen that time and again with free apps like Path, which downloaded users’ address book information without their consent in early 2012. Also, Instagram and Facebook have each caused freakouts among users when features changed or terms of service updates occurred.

Flurry’s report also found that many developers who originally debuted their app for a price eventually decided to make their app free after conducting A/B pricing experiments. In 2010, 65 percent of price-tested apps were free. As of April 2013, that number is up to 80 percent.

“I don’t know anyone building a paid app,” RunKeeper’s Mosavat says. “In-app purchases allow for broader distribution and more control over what you charge for and what the experience is for paying users.”

On Android, users crave free apps even more than on iOS. The average price of an app as of April of this year was $0.06 on Android, $0.19 for iPhone apps, and $0.50 for iPad apps.