As with all such data, the monthly absolutes are a bit meaningless. It's only when you compare month-on-month that you see the trends.
And this month sees a massive trend in terms of downloads.
Cooking the books
Tracking the average daily number of downloads from the US top 200 free apps, Fiksu says the total dropped a massive 30 percent in March to 4.45 million.
That's the lowest the monthly total has been since before the iPhone 4S was released. In February, the daily download total was 6.35 million, .
There are two possible reasons. One is that in March was a quiet month, without any holidays, exciting Apple news or major free game releases.
The other is more sinister, however, as during February and March Apple cracked down on the use of bot farms.
These are banks of computers, which are used to automatically download free content from the App Store to boost chart position.
Either or
Fiksu is even-handed in its evaluation of the situation.
"An unexpected contributing factor could be the decline in the use of robotic install tactics by app marketers responding to Apple's new policy," commented CEO Micah Adler.
However, others in the industry were much more forthright in their comments, with accusations that the practice was industry-standard for many developers and publishers, especially the well-funded social mobile outfits.
Dog don't bark
Fiksu also tracks the Cost per Loyal User Index.
This is based on the amount of cash it costs a publisher to get a user who will start their app up three times or more.
It dropped marginally in March to $1.30, from $1.31 in February.
This also suggests Apple's ban bot farms was the major reason for the drop in downloads, as by the laws of supply and demand, it should have risen sharply if there were a third less real people downloading apps.
You can see Fiksu's research, which is generated from more than 21 billion mobile app actions and more than 280 million downloads - here.
