Report: One In Six Mobile App Buyers Spent More Than $100 In 2008

A survey of 235 smartphone users who installed applications on their handset in 2008 by ABI Research last November found that 16.5 percent of them spent between $100 and $499. Obviously that’s a significant amount of money, but there are a few caveats: The first is the relatively small size of the survey, the second is that smartphone users who didn’t install an application weren’t included in the survey, and the final one is that it’s self-reported and people are notoriously bad at estimating how much they’ve spent over a period of time. Still, the fact that about 1 in 6 people who installed applications reckoned they’d spent more than $100 is a good sign for the industry.

ABI notes that applications tend to be more expensive on other platforms than on the iPhone (although it could be argued there’s just a lot less cheap stuff) and that developers have a “margin vs volume” quandary, sell many applications at a low price or sell fewer applications at a higher price — just like almost every other product in existence. Apple’s ‘halo’ effect is spreading out past its own products according to ABI, with senior analyst Jeff Orr saying: “Other device manufacturers and content developers working on non-Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) platforms all saw a bump in sales and downloads because there

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