I Am an Apple App Store Zombie

A hideously bogus "study" is going around on the fifth anniversary of Apple's App Store, buoyed by the delightful word "zombies." Since everybody loves a zombie, outlets from the BBC to CNBC are promoting some slapdash research claiming that 579,001 of 888,856 iOS apps are "zombies."

But Adeven's study uses a weird methodology that pointedly ignores what a lot of these "zombies" may be up to. I know, because I'm one of them.

First, the claim. According to this mobile marketing firm that almost nobody has heard of, a "zombie" app is one that is "not found on the top lists that Apple publishes every day." If you don't make one of those lists, the company says, your app is "invisible" and you might want to hire someone to improve your return on investment … maybe someone like Adeven.

So you see the self-serving nature of this study: Adeven is trying to boost its business by making app developers worry they won't make any money without Adeven. In the meantime, the company promotes a half-blind idea of what Apple's App Store is. That's why I'm not actually linking to the study here.

Why I'm Happy to Be a Zombie
The App Store is the only viable way to get apps out to the iOS-owning public, so it's really a bunch of stores rolled into one. There's the surface App Store, with all of the big hits and wannabe hits competing against each other. But there's also a huge number of line-of-business, hobby, event and specialty apps whose success isn't measured in whether they make the top-seller list, but in whether they're serving their defined community.

Earlier this year I wrote one of those apps, with the help of MobileRoadie. My travel guide to the 2013 Mobile World Congress trade show only got a few thousand downloads, in part because I didn't bother to promote it on-site. But people came up to me at the show to tell me how useful they found it, and it hit our target for a first attempt at an event app.

I also have celiac disease, and so there are a bunch of gluten-free dining apps on my iPhone. Celiac affects a tiny percentage of the population, so I wouldn't expect these apps to ever be best-sellers. They're lifesavers (sometimes literally) for the few with the condition, though. The tiny island where I go for vacation, meanwhile, has the local newspaper online, as an app. Not many downloads there, but it's a really convenient way to read the news.

The App Store's success requires both halves of the equation: the relatively small cadre of best-selling apps and the long tail that satisfies every niche. That's what this "zombie" study misses in its self-serving focus on best-sellers, and it's something that smaller app stores, like Windows Phone's and BlackBerry 10's, have been struggling to match. Headlines about "zombies" mislead and cloud the issue.