Apple is nearing its 10 billion app download in Jan 2011. Piracy is still a huge problem and it has grown very fast with different repositories and the awareness made by different bloggers and posts online. In several places, people sell jailbroken phones with some of these pirated apps installed. The number of apps are growing more than 120/day as new cracks + updated app version.

We used several stats gathered via our existing platform reading existing apps using mtiks services. Our conversion rates (with mtiks solution, you can apply different techniques to convert unpaid users into paid users) are higher than 10% but it depends on the app too. Also, the average price of paid apps is $3 but 148apps.biz calculated $4 as average pricing.

Also, we have estimated the number of paid apps getting sold as 17% which was reported by Toni Sacconaghi from Bernstein (between 13% – 21%) a year ago but we used the same number for our calculation.

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As shown above, the piracy was half a billion last year and the current piracy loss is in $1.5 billion (estimated). The current rate of growth completely depends upon the appstore downloads but we can see the trend around half a billion every 6 months.

The numbers reveal a lot more potential for app store market and the current trend on piracy. Unlike other mediums, these attempts can be prevented as well as developers can start tracking them to understand their app usage better. Recent news about hacking methods for new Mac AppStore even makes things harder for developers.

This report is following a similar report released last year by 24/7 Wall St.

As of Jan 15, 2011, 148Apps.biz, the app store stats are as follows:

Total Active Apps (currently available for download): 332,230
Total Inactive Apps (no longer available for download): 65,859
Total Apps Seen in US App Store: 398,089
Number of Active Publishers in the US App Store: 68,628

Current Average App Price: $4.07
Current Average Game Price: $1.66
Current Average Overall Price: $2.50

mtiks also keeps track of different major pirated app store repositories. Our current database holds more than 27,000 apps with a higher rate of piracy via Installous app which can be obtained via Cydia installed iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad devices.