Almost a month ago the release of the iPhone 3.0 software allowed developers to create turn-by-turn navigation apps. Several of these navigation apps have entered the Apple App Store, with different pricing strategies. To find out which application is the most popular, we looked at the rankings of these applications on each day since they were launched.

These are the turn-by-turn navigation apps in the US Apple App Store, sorted by popularity. We determined the popularity of apps taking into account their ranking in the navigation category, for each of the days the app has been in the App Store.

Most popular turn-by-turn apps in the Apple App Store

The most popular app is the AT&T navigator, but this is the only one published in the free category. However, users pay $9.99/month on their monthly AT&T bill.

Number 2, Gokivo, costs just $0.99. But real-time GPS Navigation costs $9.99/month, which is billed using Apple’s In App Purchase.

There are significant differences in both pricing strategies and the prices itself of these applications. MobileNavigator Europe is the most expensive of the apps that do not use subscriptions but a one-off-fee, with with $139.99. This app was a lot cheaper at launch, available for $94.99, and was one of the 30 most popular navigation apps. After raising the price, the app quickly decreased in popularity, and is no longer in the top 100 right now:

Rank and price($) of MobileNavigator Europe

So which of the different pricing strategies works best? Today, this is still hard to predict. The amount that customers are willing to pay also depends on the actual supported regions of the navigation apps. What can be seen from the above table and graph:

1. The apps with a subscription model have been the most popular over the last month
2. A price increase like MobileNavigator had, directly affects popularity

When Apple announced the support for these type of applications, TomTom was on stage to demonstrate its navigation app that is coming to the Apple App Store soon, but a release date is still not set. It will be very interesting to see which pricing strategy they will choose.

More navigation apps are entering the store, we will keep track on how they price and which model seems to be working best.