ChromeOSApps: As of September 9, 2011, the number of Chrome Web Store users reached 30 million

September 11, 2011 was the third birthday of Google's popular browser Chrome. On this occasion, Chris Sorensen, the founder of ChromeOSApps.org, a website that has been responsible for monitoring the performance of the Chrome Web Store, disclosed today that as of September 9, the number of Chrome Web Store users has exceeded 30 million.

Currently, IE is still the leader in the browser market, accounting for 42% of the market share, Firefox and Chrome account for 28% and 22% respectively. According to the data released by Chris Sorenson, the Chrome Web Store launched by Google currently has more than 6,000 applications and more than 30 million cumulative users, and the average weekly download volume has exceeded 2.5 million times.

In fact, the number of apps and cumulative users in the Chrome Web Store began to show a rapid growth trend in June this year. Industry insiders generally believe that the growth of the Chrome Web Store is most likely due to the pre-sale of Chromebooks.

As of January this year, 2.8% of Chrome Web Store users used paid apps. As of September 1, only 2.1% of the 30 million Chrome Web Store users used paid apps. In terms of app distribution, free apps accounted for 9.1% of Chrome Web Store in June this year, and this proportion dropped to 5.7% as of September 1. This series of figures shows that since the release of Chrome Web Store, the number of paid apps and the number of paid app users have been declining, while the number of free apps and free app users have maintained a significant growth trend.

The problem with the Chrome Web Store right now is that the number of app stores is growing much slower than the Android Marketplace or Apple's App Store. It's true that Google has some pretty attractive incentives to attract developers to build quality paid apps. And Google's 30% cut of app sales and 5% of in-app purchase revenue are great for developers, but consumers don't seem to buy into it.

It is predicted that by 2016, Apple's application business revenue will reach 2.86 billion US dollars, and Android app store revenue will reach 1.5 billion US dollars. Therefore, Chrome Web Store still has a huge room for growth. But it must be noted that Facebook's "Spartan Project" (a mobile platform based entirely on HTML5 and running on the Safari browser) also poses a potential threat to it. Fortunately, the current only target of "Spartan Project" is Apple's Safari browser, not Chrome.

If Google's Chromebook can really become a hot seller in the future, then Google may seriously consider integrating its web platform with its mobile platform to cross-attract more free users.