Has Local Currency Boosted Downloads in China iTunes App Store? Distimo Says Yes

When we first broke the news about China’s app store offering apps in RMB – making payment much easier, with lots of common bank/debit cards supported – many expected downloads to increase in China. But by how much has the download rate increased?

Distimo, a mobile app research company, studied the top 100 apps in China and found out that the download rate has increased by 40 to 80 percent, comparing last week over two weeks ago before the new payments system was launched. While we do not know the absolute number of downloads in China, the growth rate looks pretty damn promising for the first week, even if it hasn’t (yet?) increased exponentially.

Apple has focused a lot of attention on China this year through its official bricks-and-mortar stores and revamped Chinese iTunes store. For Chinese developers it is a huge opportunity to build the mythical “Angry Birds of China” as more and more Chinese worship the Apple brand.

In a population that is growing in affluence, we also learned that the Chinese are upgrading/buying iPhone 4 just like they’re upgrading set meals at McDonald’s — A whopping 83.4 percent of all China’s iPhone users were holding the iPhone 4 model in July this year. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook also last announced that 16 percent of all Apple’s sales come from China, which clearly is a significant amount of Apple’s bread and butter.

No matter how you see it, being part of the Apple wave in China — be it developers, resellers, or even fake stores — sounds very much like a good idea to make some decent money.