It is quite difficult to have reliable informations on how people uses the iPhone in France... We can get some concerning the amount of sell for applications but it is really scarce.

Our company makes applications for the iPhone, either for ourself, to sell on the AppStore, or as a contractor for some other companies. In order to adapt ourself to the needs of our future clients, it is important for us to understand the application market on the iPhone.

This is why we decided to make a survey to study the iPhone and the way it is used. This survey is composed of three main parts :

• Caracterisation of the users: who use the iPhone? Age, sex, social and occupational caracterisation ;
• Caracterisation of the uses of the iPhone : What is the iPhone used for? Is it just used as an internet connected device or a real multi task system ?
• Caracterisation of the way people buy applications for the iPhone : Particularly the difference of behavior in front of free and not free applications, but also what is the maximum price at which a user buys  an application spontaneously.

You can find the questionnaire here

The publication will contail the following elements :

• Methodology ;
• Raw data analysis ;
• Advanced data analysis : concerning user’s behavior on the App Store depending on his profile (The profile is determined by the first set of questions) ;
• Conclusion of the study.

Note however that the three last questions are not part of the study, this is because they are supposed to be answered in plain english which makes them hard to analyze formally.

The last question ask for an email address and will not be published.

We chose to publish this study on this blog under the Creative Commons license (by-nc-sa) on the condition that we get enough answer to make it relevant ( 100 is the minimum). The questionnaire will be online until the 10th of june 2009 and the study will be published within the next two weeks.

Our choice might look strange but we chose to publish this study under a free license for many reasons :

• We have always found in free software some low cost and reliable solution to answer our need and we want to promote this kind of behavior.
• The market of mobile applications is far from reaching maturity, it is still in great expansion which means that competition is not that hard that we have to keep private this kind of informations.
• KenaGard is a young company and we need to have people know us, from this point of view, publishing openly this kind of study is clearly in our best interest. 

The purpose of an application is to fulfill its users' needs .. But how to fulfill someone's needs without knowing him ? The answer to this question can be a market study, but once the application is launched and the linked with user's done, could we wait to know a little more ?

Of course some users are very interactive and tells us what they want, do they represent the anonymous majority ? That's not sure.

On the Internet, the solution has been simple : "observe in order to know". That's where came the tracking solutions among which the most known is Google Analytics.

Thus that's with pleasure that we found the interface concept of Google Analytics in the Flurry Analytics service who enables us to do what we already do on websites. A simple installation and then you get a thousand of useful information around the question "who are our users ?" : sessions duration, localization, hardware, everything we need to know better what they need and thus fulfill them.