Top iPhone Applications: Will Any Productivity Tools Be Launched at All in the Future?

December is invariably a fascinating month for many industries as everyone tries to summarize everything from the year behind us and point out some trends wherever possible. We have recently spoken about Yahoo releasing the most popular search terms of its search engine over the year where Barack Obama only managed to get to the 3^rd position while Britney Spears still remained the most searched-for subject and person. Today Apple also has some results to share with us - this time about the most popular applications available in its iTunes App Store.

This is the first year when iTunes acted like a distribution channel for downloadable applications that users can install on an iPhone or an iPod Touch which makes the announcement more interesting as until now we could only see the most popular downloadable music and videos from Apple downloads stats. Since iTunes App Store launched back in July Apple has been tracking statistics for downloads of both free and paid-for applications and the results are definitely worth taking a look at. Clicking this iTunes link will open the lists of the most popular paid and free applications in various categories, including games, entertainment, music, and social networking.

There are no (or little) surprises in the list of the top 10 applications for iPhone users as Apple you can always see what applications are mostly popular among Apple users at any given moment of time so the names on the lists are at the very least more or less familiar. The list of the top applications that users need to pay to get looks like this:

1. Koi Pond (entertainment, peculiar game to gaze at a virtual pond and feed virtual fish)

2. Texas Hold’em (game)

3. Moto Chaser (game)

4. Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart 3d (game)

5. Super Monkey Ball (game)

6. Cro-Mag Rally (game)

7. Enigmo (game)

8. Pocket Guitar (music)

9. Recorder (business utility)

10. iBeer (entertainment, even more peculiar application that produces beer foam when you shake your device)

And here is the list of the 10 most downloadable free applications:

1. Pandora Radio (music)

2. Facebook (social networking)

3. Tap Tap Revenge (game)

4. Shazam (music)

5. Labyrinth Lite Edition (game)

6. Remote (entertainment)

7. Google Earth (travel utility)

8. Lightsaber Unleashed (entertainment)

9. AIM (social networking)

10. Urbanspoon (travel utility)

And the differences here are totally amazing to me showing that users are very willing to pay for entertainment, they will be happy to stick to free applications for everything related to business. In the top paid applications 6 out of 10 applications are games, 3 are entertainment and only one (Recorder) can be characterized as a business utility. So I think the trend is quite clear: iPhone users are quite willing to pay for having games on their phones and are rather happy with the business applications that are available for free.

At the same time the list of top free applications looks very different as people are mostly interested in various networking and communications utilities as well as those applications (like Pandora) that bring better music experience to their mobile devices.

And you thought iPhone is a great communications and business tools? Owners definitely think otherwise voting for entertainment with their downloads and their money. But the most disturbing thing is that we will most certainly see all the talented developers working on games and entertainment applications next year hoping to repeat the success of the most popular applications and get the quick and huge profits off users’ desire to get even more entertainment on their iPhones and iPod Touches. But when it comes to productivity tools, they will most certainly be only launched to support existing desktop applications by established developers of such tools.