Mac App Store dominated by games

The Mac App Store, Apple’s attempt to bring the iPhone and iPad app store model to its Mac computers, launched this morning, and mobile analytics firm Distimo has released a report outlining what apps are in the store.

Distimo counts 1,604 apps in the store (Apple’s press release is not specific, only saying that the number is “more than 1,000”), and as with the iPad and the iPhone, games are the biggest category (more than 15 percent), as you can see in the chart at the end of this post. Games’ dominance is also reflected in the top app charts — the most popular paid app is iPhone game sensation Angry Birds, and there are three other games in the top 10. (The most popular free app is Twitter for Mac.)

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However, productivity and utility apps make a much stronger showing on the Mac than they do on other devices, which makes sense, since people presumably do more work on their Macs than on their iPhones. Distimo says productivity apps make up nearly 15 percent of the Mac App Store, compared to less than 5 percent of iPhone and iPad apps.

As for pricing, my own impression suggests that Mac apps are on average cheaper than the desktop software that you’d buy in stores, but more expensive than apps for the iPhone and iPad. Distimo says that in cases where there’s a Mac and iPad version of the app, the pricing is normally the same.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog breaks down the prices into several buckets. (TUAW reports a lower app count, 959, than either Distimo or Apple, perhaps because it uses more complicated methodology for weeding out duplicate apps.) Nearly half the Mac apps fall into the cheapest bucket, between free and $5, but there are also a substantial number between $10 and $50.

Of course, as the app store grows, we can expect these numbers to change. Oh, and if you’re a Mac owner who hasn’t figured out how to install the Mac App Store, you can either check your computer’s available software updates and install the new version of the Mac OS, or you can go here.