When I started noticing that my iPhone home screen was practically aqua, despite the dark background, I decided to conduct a formal study of iPhone/iPad app background colors.
The results?
More than half (52 percent) of all iPhone/iPad apps are either blue or black.
The message?
Designers and developers need to stop making blue iPhone apps!
The full rainbow of statistics is shown in the chart above, but the numbers speak for themselves: purple is the loneliest color.
So the next time you download an application to your iPhone, ask yourself: what did violet ever do to you?
What’s the only reasonable explanation for the trend?
Steve Jobs’ trademark style is rubbing off: (blue) jeans and a (black) turtleneck.
And purple is such a lovely colour! I feel for purple! =(((( lol
Interesting, It always seemed like black was the predominant color for iPhone icons and I never thought of blue, but after going back and looking at my phone it seems blue is well represented as well
How did you conduct your study and what do the numbers above the columns represent? If they are just the number of apps in your iTunes then it’s hardly an exhaustive study. You don’t know if you have biases in the type of apps you download. Sorry to be critical but I’m a scientist and your statements like “half of all iPod/upas apps are blue or black” is mislrepresenting your sample given that it’s only a tiny fraction of the total number of apps.
Of course you could have written a script to download all the icons then used an image processor to categorise them based on their predominant colour, but it doesn’t sound like you did that.
Thanks for asking. We took a sample of 500 random app icons from the U.S. iPad and iPhone App Store. The numbers above each column represent how many apps (out of 500) fit into that category. These were not apps from a personal collection, rather a sample of all apps available. A larger sample is always better, but given the time and financial restraints, we felt 500 was a strong representation of the app store as a whole.