Last month we featured a blog post on available localizations in the Top 50 US Paid iOS App Store.This month we bring you some interesting statistics from the Mac App Store.

Top 5 localized app languages

This is the statistic most want to read. From the 8 stores we surveyed across North America, Europe and Asia, the top 5 languages in descending order were:

• French
• German
• Japanese
• Spanish
• Italian

Is there a relationship between French and the French app store?

Yes, and no. On the French app store 52% of the Top 100 contained the French localization, making it the most popular localization other than English on the French store. This applies to the German and Japanese stores too, but oddly not the Italian store. Either Italians are happy using software in English or there simply aren’t enough Italian localizations out there. I’d guess the latter. (Let’s help them out, here’s a 10% discount on Italian localization).

What is the overall likelihood of a Top 100 Paid OS X app being localized?

Across the stores, an average of 46% of the Top 100 were localized. The most prolific localizer is of course Apple. If a developer has localized, they are very likely to have localized to two or more languages other than English.

Are non-US developers more likely to localize?

The idea for the original post came from a discussion on whether we thought Europeans were more likely to translate their apps than Americans, simply because of their proximity to so many different languages.

From this small study, non-US developers are more likely to localize than US developers. On average across the stores 56% of non-US developers had localized vs 42% of US developers. On the US store 48% of non-US developers had localized vs 34% of US developers.

Some funky findings on Mac App Store pricing

While we were at it, we decided to record the mode (most frequest) and mean (the average) pricing on the 8 different app stores. To avoid currency confusion, the pricing is tiered.

For reference: Tier 1 = $0.99/€0.79/£0.69, Tier 10 = $9.99/€7.99/£0.69, Tier 16 = $15.99/€12.99/£10.99

Grr…

To end on a whimsical note, it’s quite funny Growl was ranking numero uno in nearly every store, beating Apple’s own software. Think it’s time Apple incorporated a notifications system into Mac OS, don’t you?

Sources

We surveyed the US, UK, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Singaporean and Philippine Mac App Stores, looking at each of the Top 100 Paid Apps on 7th November 2011. If you would like the raw numbers document, email us.