US mobile app dominance threatened by ANGRY BIRDS revolution

Locality

The locality effect is not surprising, who else than local programmers would have interest in say a time table app or a special mapping app for a country. One of the most useful local apps on my phone is a topographical map that draws on data from my country's official surveyors. (no, Google maps and similar do not compare, this one basically shows even the locations of larger rocks), why would a US company make this one?

Biases, biases

Re Finland: was the experiment done in winter or in summer? Finnish winter my be a more important bias than affinity to Rovio...

And users over the world preferring domestic apps? Why is it surprising, given the natural locality of both language and services?

A lot of the more useful apps are relevant for specific geographies, therefore of course there will be a lot of "loyalty" to own country apps. While some app development is naturally outsourced much is either licensed as if it is local or developed with local partners who are more likely to understand the requirements.

Specific apps? How about the underground, taxi, bar and club, local travel and restaurants, dating, banking, tourist information and other area specific apps?

How many unique apps are there?

Because its so cheap and easy to produce an app now, we are flooded with millions of crap apps. Where there once there was type of publishing firewall made up of cost to a producer which filtered most of the crap out, now anyone can push something to an app store near them.

For example I see 30 or 40 different "wifi-booster" apps for Android, look into them and you see they are almost all carbon copy's of each other. I'm guessing these all go into the pot of "home grown American Talent" the only thing holding there rest of the world back is their poor English which turns someone off when they have a full English version doing the same thing.

That and there is a very good chance that the people who wrote this report have not got the full information on Chinese apps, which probably dwarf the yanks to the point where they don't appear on a line graph

What are the Finns doing with all that data ....

I think hear/read somewhere that Angry Birds was mainly a data collection app but with quite an addictive game as a front end - or was that just 'tin foil hat' wearers chat ?