The Apple App Store currently yields the highest revenue for smartphone apps. The gap between it and Google Play, however, is closing rapidly. Android is, however, quickly gaining market share.
Based on Schoger ibid. App developers would be well advised to develop Android versions of their best-selling dictionaries within the next year to ensure they do not miss out on revenue, particularly if the target countries are Japan and Korea. Most sales of dictionaries apps are for learners of English and so the residents of English speaking countries have little need for bilingual dictionary apps at least. In contrast, the Japanese, South Korean and Germany stores show the highest revenues for dictionary apps indicating that residents of these countries are willing to spend significant amounts of money on good quality dictionaries.
It is not possible to calculate the total revenue of dictionary apps in the two app stores in absolute terms, as the figures given in Schoger ibid. App dictionary publishers should therefore not expect profit winners in the same league as games, productivity and utility apps.
On the 9th June , the Apple App Store had 5, free and paid dictionary apps and Google Play 4, apps, giving a ratio of , respectively. If paid apps are solely considered, the number of apps drops to 4, and 2,, respectively, i. The exact price breakdown is given in Table 3 below.
These apps mostly contain premium, branded dictionaries which tend to sell well. Generally speaking, app prices which are set by the dictionary publisher increase with the number of headwords in the dictionary——a tradition inherited from the print industry. Prices set by software developers, conversely, are often unrelated to the size of the dictionary.
Unlike a book, users cannot determine from the app how many headwords it contains and so developers do not feel obliged to set the price based on the number of headwords.
Such developers may keep increasing the price until profit starts to fall. The main publishing houses of Western European languages, Japanese and Korean have released apps for most of their dictionary range including separate apps for different sized dictionaries, e. Although there are dictionary apps for other languages, e.
It is possible to make generalizations about which kinds of dictionary apps rank highly in the grossing charts based on the rankings of dictionary apps between the years and The app revenues tend to be highest for well-known dictionary publishers in their own country, e. The Larousse French dictionaries sell very well in France. The rankings outside of their home country are generally much lower than in the home country.
This is presumably because most learners of a particular language reside in their home country and use the dictionary compiled by well-known local publishing houses. For instance, most users of a French—English dictionary are French living in France and use dictionaries published by Larousse.
The exception to this generalization covers English dictionaries compiled by publishers such as Oxford University Press, Collins and Merriam-Webster. These dictionaries sell well outside the home countries of UK and USA, as many non-English native speakers buy English monolingual dictionaries in their home country.
As the highest grossing dictionary apps tend to be dictionaries by local publishers for the local language, one can conclude that the reputation of the publisher is the most significant factor in predicting the sales of a dictionary, not the functions of the dictionary or the reputation of the developer. Apps of well-known dictionaries offering basic headword search without advanced or extra features such as word quizzes, word games, the ability to search for examples, idioms and other inflectional forms of a word or phrase, are likely to sell just as well as a comparable dictionary app with these features.
The French—English Dictionary by Larousse and the Merriam-Webster dictionary app are good examples of apps with no-frills features which sell very well. There are, however, several examples of less known dictionaries becoming the best-selling apps in their country primarily because they were the first dictionaries available for that language, i. For example, although Genius is one of the best-selling English—Japanese print dictionaries, the Wisdom English—Japanese Dictionary app by Monokakido www.
Although Daijirin by the publisher Sanseido is not the best-known Japanese monolingual dictionary, the app produced by Monokakido was one of the first to appear in the Apple App Store and is the most popular monolingual dictionary app.
In addition, the design of its user interface won it great exposure from Apple. Over the last 2 years, a trend has evolved in which developers, particularly sellers of games, provide an app free of charge or at a very low price and offer premium content by way of in-app purchases. Such free apps are called freemiums. Freemiums are, however, poorly represented among dictionary apps. Footnote 2 Cheap apps with in-app purchases or freemiums often only contain small, sometimes open source dictionaries to whet the appetite of users.
Expensive apps with in-app purchase, however, normally contain a premium dictionary in the base app. The Prolog www. The full version of each dictionary can be activated with an in-app purchase. The reluctance of dictionary app developers to make use of the freemium model is presumably due to the tradition in the print industry where a single book is the basic product. As print dictionary publishers are the ones to license their content to developers and drive dictionary app development in general, they carry this tradition on into the app store where one app is created for one print dictionary.
Ideally, several books or sources useful for learning a particular language should be integrated into one app. For example, the basic app may contain a general dictionary. Specialized dictionaries, a collocations dictionary, extra example sentences, phrase books, grammar and usage references, verb conjugation tables, pronunciation recordings and cultural notes could be made available as in-app purchases.
This contributes to its consistent highest rankings among Chinese dictionaries across stores. The biggest competitors of paid dictionary apps fall into three categories: 1 machine translation engines, 2 portals and websites offering free premium dictionary content and 3 dictionaries embedded in mobile phone operating systems. Machine translation apps allow users to translate single words or entire sentences automatically. They are popular as they are mostly free, allow translation between a large combination of languages, support sentence input using voice recognition and can pronounce the output sentence using speech synthesis technology.
High-quality machine translation apps show a high user satisfaction rating and hence are an important competitor of dictionary apps. The second main competitor of dictionary apps consists of Internet portals and publisher websites that provide free access to premium dictionaries. There are also Internet portals such as Naver dic. Software for Windows. Handheld Emulators.
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