SEOUL, KOREA - Despite a prolonged economic slowdown, the application market enjoyed a robust growth last year thanks to the increase in settlement rates for for-fee applications.Together with app portal Podgate, KTH conducted a survey on the fourth quarter 2012 smartphone usage patterns. The survey was conducted with 5,371 smartphone users in Korea from December 19 to 31.
According to the survey, 43 percent of iPhone users said that they had the experience of installing for-fee apps within the past one month, followed by Android phone users’ 32 percent, up 7 and 6 percentage points, respectively, from a quarter ago.
During every quarter of 2012, “free or not-free” was picked as the factor that generates the biggest impact on the decision of whether or not to install the apps. The share of those who selected this factor as the biggest variable, however, has declined from 80 percent in the first quarter to 75 percent in the fourth quarter.
enews@hankyung.com
*Article provided by The Korea Economic Daily
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