Surge of News apps for iPhone

Ben Lorica has a roundup of recent iPhone app sales on the O’Reilly Radar blog and notes a surge in apps for News.

On any given week, about 22% of all apps in the U.S. iTunes store are free. The percentage of free News apps is slightly higher (31%). The most popular News apps are from media companies (and tend to be free), while paid News apps are mostly software for reading and organizing news, or premium content. News content providers increasingly need to have a strategy for delivering content to the iPhone and similar mobile devices. At least for the iPhone, many news organizations have done just that: during the week ending 7/12, there were over 1,500 News apps.

The second fastest-growing category (in terms of # of apps) over the last 12 weeks was Navigation, a category that our resident geo expert Brady blogs about frequently. The share of free Navigation apps (14%) is among the lowest of all the categories (behind Books and Travel).

More charts here.